GPU external enclosures

[smashley]

Has anyone built or used a PCI Express external enclosure with Geforce cards to extend the GPU power for a laptop? Trying to think of alternatives to building cpu based render blades.

[jujubee]

I've been looking into it but haven't really found anything online aside from a couple of products and Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin mining as a bad reference (just bad in general lol) because it doesn't require that much bandwidth compared to rendering.

[stwagstaff]

I know I am responding to an old post, but I have had great success rendering with a CUBIX Xpander box with multiple Nvidia Quadro cards. I have not tried this with a laptop, however.

http://www.cubix.com/gpu-xpander-desktop

[LeePuznowski]

Currently using a Netstor with 4 780 Tis. Although I have yet to test out Vray RT with it, I've put it through extensive iray rendering. It's fast. I have it hooked up to a workstation, but I assume a laptop would give same/similar results.

[3LP]

Nice,
Both those cubix and netstor seems really good.
Do you think there is any chance to connect more than 1 of those boxes on a workstation?
Would be great to have more than 4 cards connected.

[LeePuznowski]

Unikely, as I believe the maximum GPUs allowed per Win7 or 8 isn't above 8. I currently have 6 (4 external + 2 internal) on Win 7. We will probably soon be upgrading to another Netstor external with 4 more, so I'll get back to you on how that works out.

[3LP]

Hey mate,

I was asking this as I saw that on cubix they have Rackmount that uses 8 cards at once but it seems to be more expensive than go for 2 boxes of 4.
That would be great if you could keep us posted.

Thanks

Stan