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Help - Ryzen build for 2+ GPUs ??

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Frazier08

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Apr 7, 2017
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In this reality
I need to build a small budget friendly rig that will support 2+ GTX 1070s (or greater). I was gonna go with an i5 skylake or something but I wanna give this new AMD chip a go.

Do AMDs handle PCIe on the mobo itself? If so then it would be motherboard dependent of how many cards can be used right?

The last AMD chip I owned was the 1st gen Phenom 9500 before the 9550 update.... it's been awhile.

Machine purpose: folding
 
The PCIe lanes are provided by the CPU, but the motherboard chipset does effect how many of those will be made available. For multiple GPUs you are definitely going to want an X370 board.

If you are going to do CPU folding as well I would suggest you shoot for the R7 1700 and something like an Asus X370 Prime.
 
And at the price an r 1700 comes in at, id want the IPC and overclocking ability of the 7700k with an sli setup. But somce you are folding... seems like a good choice. :)
 
The Asus prime x370 is pretty solid. No major complaints, but before jumping in on a purchase, check the qvl list for memory. Thats the biggest pain point right now for me, as I didn't really. I can tell you the 1700 @3.7ghz, folding on 15 threads (which seems to choke out the GPU a bit) and an RX480 does about 350k PPD. Folding on 12 threads is the next step down, and should be where you would run this rig at, if you have dual GPUs folding.
 
To add on top of the other people's posts here, x370 is your only solution for dual GPU, and possibly even tri-GPU but I wouldn't do that. B350 is awful with dual GPUs, which I have tested and found little to no performance gain with my 480s.

Now as far as the architecture goes for these new systems (this does include Intel). You will only find dual x8 PCIE for 2xAMD GPUs. This is because the each slot has a direct x8 PCIE lane between each other, and a x8 PCIE lane going back to the CPU directly. Each slot has x16 and can be ran at x16 if in single card mode. When you turn on Xfire, you will see the cards go down to x8, where half of its original x16 is now talking between two ports. Hence why you see a greater improvement of performance with dual cards when it comes to AMDs GPUs, and why you don't need a bridge connector anymore.
 
To add on top of the other people's posts here, x370 is your only solution for dual GPU, and possibly even tri-GPU but I wouldn't do that. B350 is awful with dual GPUs, which I have tested and found little to no performance gain with my 480s.

Now as far as the architecture goes for these new systems (this does include Intel). You will only find dual x8 PCIE for 2xAMD GPUs. This is because the each slot has a direct x8 PCIE lane between each other, and a x8 PCIE lane going back to the CPU directly. Each slot has x16 and can be ran at x16 if in single card mode. When you turn on Xfire, you will see the cards go down to x8, where half of its original x16 is now talking between two ports. Hence why you see a greater improvement of performance with dual cards when it comes to AMDs GPUs, and why you don't need a bridge connector anymore.
I was wondering how that worked on the AMD GPUs, I haven't had any AMD GPUs in a long while, or followed the newer products recently.
 
Thats all very interesting, however, in the context of F@H Im pretty sure the PCIe lanes are much less of an issue. If I recall(this may have changed) even operating on a 1X PCIe slot didnt hurt F@H performance.
 
Thats all very interesting, however, in the context of F@H Im pretty sure the PCIe lanes are much less of an issue. If I recall(this may have changed) even operating on a 1X PCIe slot didnt hurt F@H performance.
+1... doesnt really matter.. ;)
 
@ ED and ssjwizard


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You dont need the bandwidth in folding, so even if it drops to 4x speed, it will still happily fold along.
 
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I guess it receives large data sets, Calculates, send back, repeat? So its not limited by I/O just by compute speed.
 
Derail complete, enabling correctional conversational sub-routine engagement.
 
LOL

Well from my research it's best practice to stay at or above PCIe 3.0 @ 8x. I wouldnt be opposed to trying 4x but something like 15% gets chopped off. Not exactly sure dont shoot the messenger!

I need this to replace an old 775/Q9650 system that would probably stroke out if I installed this 1070 into it.

I pulled the trigger one these components... Stayed under $400 for these

--ASRock X370 Killer SLI

--AMD Ryzen 5 1600


this machine will probably become my daily driver, I really look forward to it. I dont think ill put the CPU to work folding. Ill have plenty of GPUs working for me soon. Build thread in folding forums for anyone interested.
 
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Good choice. Yeah Like I said before, I tried to do an Xfire build on a B350 board while my CH6 was in the shop... It was horrible. The x4 by x8 was just garbage.
 
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