Dual AMD w7000 VS with Dual XEON

#1

I just hold of a W7000 over w5000, I have now just got the budget for a Dual Xeon E5-2697 v2 2.70 GHz build and was looking to fit that with a geforce 680 and keep the W7000 for a second machine that would run Maya and other successful programs with it.

Is there any benefit to be had of keeping the 7000 and getting another 7000 for dual GPU usage in Premiere, After FX, Nuke and Maya?

Will I be able to use the combined specs pushing it upto 8GBs and over 300 gb’s of band width etc.within Maya especially or After FX etc.

Firepro has just been certified for use by adobe and Da Vinci so is the good news for the range? See - http://www.fireprographics.com/ws/mae/adobe/index.asp

It is ither this or sell the w7000 to get a configuration of something else. This possibly putting my budget in the 800 pound range ($1400). I am basically trying to build the fastest machine excluding spending the price of XEONS on multiple professional graphics cards.

Many thanks

#2

Outside of gaming and number-crunching apps or GPU-based rendering, multiple GPUs in SLI or Crossfire will have no effect on your viewports or performance in any of these applications. You will not be able to combine them, nor will these applications use the second card at all - especially Maya.

The VRAM is not stackable, you will not have 8GB for textures for example if you combine both cards, nor the combined bandwidth.

#3

Hi there,

Well since this post I found out some more info. I saw this video. -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ba86DA6kE

I have seen lots of people say their is no gain to be had but is this video demonstrating. Information is so scarce on this subject. Is there something I am not understanding here?

Many thanks!

#4

A 50% speed boost is pretty poor for having to buy two cards (in fact only getting 70fps on a plain shaded 2 million poly model spinning is pretty poor…) I’d much rather get a single more powerful card, the electricity used on an extra card will soon add up.

#5

That video is 4 years old, is not very useful to judge more recent GPU.
Here you can find an interesting article about the Wxxxx firepro cards:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6137/the-amd-firepro-w9000-w8000-review-part-1/2

#6

Ok, looks like there is no realitivley cheapest fix… I’;d rather prefer to keep the 7000 and get Cuda card for all the others stuff. the best of both… Thanks for the help!

#7

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