Hey there, I work for a University as a 3d generalist and we’re looking to get a PC to develop Vive experiences. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at hardware and wondering if this is overkill (keeping in mind I also render 3d animations via Blender which loves SLi and Nvidia cards and we’ll be doing some photogrammetry).
One thing that’s overkill is SLI. UE4 doesn’t use it and there’s no indication it will anytime soon. Unity does with Nvidia’s VR-SLI integration but that’s for another forum.
If you’re looking for an “overkill” system and you don’t need it for a couple of weeks, you might consider the new Samsung 960 M.2 drive - it’s screamingly fast compared to pretty much everything else out there. They’re not going to be out for a few weeks, though.
I just built a “pseudo-overkill” system, but only with a single 1070 card. It’s effectively the same as the gaming system you link to, but with a better motherboard (the Gaming 7 from Gigabyte), the single 1070, and only 16 gigs of RAM. I only overclocked it a little (to 4.4 GHz), so I used an aircooled system instead of liquid for the CPU. It gets a solid 90 Hz on everything I’ve thrown at it so far, and was only about $1800. For the difference in price, you could buy two of my setup… and a whole extra VR rig.
If it’s for a development system, I’d suggest something more like the Cooler Master HAF XB II EVO instead of that gamer box. It’s much, much easier to get into and work on for a research environment.
Thanks guys, yeah the SLI is mainly more for rendering in Blender.
Basically we have a grant to spend on equipment so it’s really up to my manager whether he wants to spend less or more but I’ll keep it all you’ve said in mind.
I think there’s just a small confusion in that SLI is a actually rendering technique used in real-time engines vs Blender’s use of GPUs for its renderer. I have a quad GTX 1080 workstation which I use for Redshift GPU rendering, photogrammetry and other smaller simulation uses. I look forward to when I can actually use more than one GPU in realtime VR Rendering. I did see the GPUs light up in Nvidia’s VR Fun Park - I think two were doing frame rendering and another was used for physics simulation.
If he’s using them for GPU rendering, then there’s no such thing as overkill. GPU rendering pretty much scales linearly with the amount of GPU’s so the more the better.
