Is it feasible to run multiple GT 710s on modern CPUs with limited PCIe lanes?
Posted by Erzengel9@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 18 comments
I know that for most graphics cards, having enough PCIe lanes to connect the GPU directly to the CPU is important to avoid bottlenecks.
Since the GT 710 is such an old, low-powered card, I’m wondering if it’s possible on a modern PC to run multiple—up to 8—GT 710s with a modern Ryzen or Intel CPU, which can have up to 28 PCIe lanes.
Obviously, you couldn’t give each card 8 or even 4 lanes, but I’m wondering if that really matters, given how little performance these cards offer.
Would it be feasible to run a GT 710 at full load using only a single PCIe lane? Would the performance bottleneck be noticeable?
RECAR77@reddit
The Asus GT730-4H-SL-2GD5 can connect 4 displays with a Pcie2x1 connector. If that doesn't bottleneck then a GT710 certainly wont.
Getting 8 cards on most consumer platform is still gonna be tricky. While you technically have 24-28ish lanes, afaik the most you can bifurcate a 16x slot is to 4x4. So you can get 4 cards into a 16x slot but then you would need a motherboard with 4 more pcie slots
JuanElMinero@reddit
Speaking of Asus, they released this for the Skylake/Kaby Lake B250 consumer platform.
The pre-pandemic mining craze yielded some wild stuff.
RECAR77@reddit
Interestingly when you look at the manual apperantly you can only connect up to 8 nvidia gpus while the other 11 have to be amd. I wonder if that is a limitation from nvidia?
jigsaw1024@reddit
They had a bunch of boards during the crypto boom that had a lot of x1 slots on them. That's really the only way this gets feasible.
There are ways to take a 16x down to the equivalent of 16 x1, but it gets messy and expensive, negating any cost savings from using a bunch cheap GPUs for whatever OP is planning.
Frexxia@reddit
What conceivable reason could anyone have to do actually do this?
Erzengel9@reddit (OP)
I’m putting together a little retro gaming rig to emulate multiple old consoles at once, just for fun. Running each emulator in its own VM seems nice so each “machine” can act independently—kind of like having separate consoles on a network. I just wanted to make sure the GT 710s can handle it without getting bottlenecked, even at full load.
jigsaw1024@reddit
You can get older Nvidia Tesla cards and split them logically into multiple VMs. A single card would be much easier to deal with.
I think this video from Craft computing explains how to do it all on Proxmox:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXPMcBqoi8
ComfortableTomato807@reddit
I opened this post with that curiosity
geerlingguy@reddit
Me three.
I mean, I do wild things, but this is next level!
Erzengel9@reddit (OP)
Sounds great! Will they manage full load fine on only one lane?
pdp10@reddit
The GT710 is still sold as a the lowest-end Nvidia with four video outputs. One application would be video surveillance monitoring, but I'm sure the readership can name or imagine others.
mduell@reddit
Probably video wall/multi monitor type applications.
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MagicPistol@reddit
Why would you ever want to do this? You could get any low end modern GPU and it would run circles around 8 710s.
BlueGoliath@reddit
What is the point of this? Are you trying to achieve world domination using GT 710s?
EnergyOfLight@reddit
Of course yes, provided you don't use the bandwidth. You could use them for some specific compute usecases, eg. you can use any GPU for mining most algos using PCIe X1
EloquentPinguin@reddit
Well if you look at some of the crypto rigs from the golden era of the cryptoboom you see tons rigs having cards running with torturously few lanes (that being exactly one lane), because the workload (guessing numbers for hashes) doesn't require any bandwidth.
From a quick research there are even GT710 with PCIe x1 cards, so I'd guess these tiny cards don't run terribly. The performance of a Gt710 is sufficiently poor that a x1 interface might not be terribly limiting even in interactive workloads.
Revolutionary_Tax546@reddit
Just get a server case, and build a small super-computer with G710s all running in parallel. Then watch Win 11, suck all that speed, and turn it into a Sluggish POS in less that 2 years.