1x 1080ti vs 3-4x 1060s regardless of power

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Monoman

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Oct 16, 2013
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Hi,

I'm interested in dabbling in some DL/ML/AI stuff with nvidia and was wondering if anyone had any insight on my question referenced above?

Just speaking in general terms, which would be faster for DL tasks, a single 1080ti or 3-4 1060's? Power is not a concern in this build.

Thanks
 

Tom5051

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Jan 18, 2017
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Depends if the application you are using supports SLI. If it does then 4x 1060s would beat 1x 1080ti however wouldn't 2x 1080gtx non-ti be a more affordable and ultimately more powerful rig?

Also it depends how your motherboard uses it's PCIe 3.0 slots. Usually you get 8x or less in SLI which affects overall throughput.
 

Monoman

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Oct 16, 2013
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I'm open to anything really. I should have stated my budget is around a single 1080ti for this.

The MB I'm using is the Intel S2600CP so it has a bunch of 8x PCIe 2.0 slots until I upgrade to a v2 e5.

Thanks for the recommendation!
 

Tom5051

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Jan 18, 2017
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PCIe 2.0 will be very limiting for any of the 10 series GTX cards. You might want to upgrade your PC and go with a single 1080ti.
 
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Patrick

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I am a huge 1080 Ti fan. I think I will be closing in on having 18 of them soon for the two deep learning builds.

The big advantages, others have already noted. First, you have one slot and lower power consumption. Second, virtually everything will scale on a bigger GPU with more memory. Moving to multi-GPU scaling is harder. Newer frameworks are fixing a lot of that but still one big GPU is best.

Of course, you can always mine with the 1080 Ti then buy a second one in 3 months :)
 
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Patrick

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pgh5278

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Oct 25, 2012
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There seems to be some banter in the news about various graphics card manufactures delivering PASCAL 106 cards ( IE 1060 cards) in a month or so, as the potentially the sweet spot on cost vs power vs income or so..( my interp of the articles..) Good thing with GTX 1080 Ti is that they should be easy to sell..? Planning to start with an ASUS 1080Ti strix for a few months until it goes into son's gaming box..
 
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Monoman

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Thanks all. Looks like I wait out for a little to see where the market goes and make a decision. Appreciate it.
 

Klee

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Jun 2, 2016
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Thanks all. Looks like I wait out for a little to see where the market goes and make a decision. Appreciate it.

Yea this is where i'm at, after selling both of my RX480's I actually have enough for a GTX 1080 Ti.....but with new cards coming I think I can live with my old GTX 650 for a while.
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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If you are buying now, a single 1080Ti. It will game better, be simpler to do any ML projects on, mine almost as well as 3x 1060 6GB, and take up less slots (not a problem in your case). 1060 6GB are being bought up for mining as the 1070s dry up(GDDR5X is slower compared to GDDR5 for the current memory intense algorithms), so they are getting harder to find. For example, Fry's in CA increased the price of an Asus 1060 6GB from $270 to $330 as I was driving to buy it tonight.
asus10606gb.png
 
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Monoman

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Oct 16, 2013
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I think the best answer is a single 1080ti. Time to find the best one for my case (intel P4000)