For my next video card.....

kyoto kid

...well my "next card" turned out to be a 12 GB 3060 XC as earlier this afternoon I received notice form EVGA that I had cleared the months long waitlist (which was even closed for a while) for one and the price was too good at 409$ which, in baseball terms, was in my "wheelhouse".  So pulled the trigger on the order and should have it no later than midweek next week.  Now all I need to do is scrape up what I need for upgrading the rest of the components so I'll have 10/20 U cores/threads, 64 GB of memory, and be TPM 2.0 compliant for W11.

As I have an auxiliary PSU, almost thinking for now of running the 3060 and Titan X together which will give me almost as many cores as an A4000.  Since both have 12 GB there would be no fallback to the "lesser" card.

amysparkles

Can someone explain to me what overclocking a GPU does, and whether it's appropriate for Iray rendering?

 

I just received a message from the people building my compuer, and they said there's been a delay in getting the RTX 3060 I requested. They are offering an overclocked RTX 3060 instead. My choice seems to be either take the overclocked card and get my computer early next week, or wait for the 3060 I requested to arrive, which may mean another week or two. I do not mind waiting, but obviously I would prefer the wait is not too long. I had hoped to get my new computer and all my content and shaping presets transferred over before Hanukkah (which begins this year on November 29 in the secular calendar)

Edit: The GPU they're offering is a Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060 Overclocked. I did reply and tell them I chose the 3060 for the 12GB VRAM. So as long as I get the 12GB and the GPU is stable for Iray rendering, that's what matters most. I think.

 

What do you think I should do? Should I go for the over clocked card, or wait for the GPU I originally requested? I am a little worried the overclocked card will overheat and fail if I'm rendering a particularly complex scene for a couple of hours. I also have the energy consumption to think about. From what I understand, overclocked GPUs produce more heat and therefore draw more power.

 

Edit: The GPU they're offering in place of the 3060 I requested is Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060 Overclocked. So it's really the same card but with a different name before the RTX. I am curious whether overclocking makes a difference to rendering though.

kyoto kid

...update report. 

Installed the 3060 XC on my system this morning booted up to find only one display was getting a signal and after it said that deriver settings were being updated shifted into Chipset graphics mode.  Spent a fair part of the morning and early afternoon troubleshooting but nothing worked.  Apparently the card is not being recognised by the system. as the fans don't even spin up.   I checked and rechecked all connections. and can find no reason why this occurred. It is a factory new card direct from EVGA not a refurb or from a third party vendor.

While my system is a "white box" assembled with older hardware, that should not be the cause as I tested the same build in a configuration simulator and there were no conflicts.  Incredibly stymied by this.  I re-installed the older card I've been using (a Maxwell Titan X) and everything works fine again.  I submitted a ticket to EVGA and to Nvidia (relating to drivers).  EVGA responded but felt it had to do with the PSU (Also EVGA) not the card and asked me to submit an RMA ticket for a replacement but the unit is barely a year old and has been (as well as still is) working fine with the Titan-X re-installed (using the same PCIe slot I had the 3060 in)..

Beginning to suspect and fear it may be "DOA"  however it was sealed in it's normal factory packaging (including the clear protective film on the top of the unit) while the outer box had no signs of damage at all.  After waiting this long, it would be a major disappointment. if that were so as since Iray was optimised for the RTX series, they did a software fix for older cards .that regrettably uses up a reasonable portion fo the card's VRAM (MSI Afterburner indicates the Titan-X has only 8192 MB of VRAM which is about ⅓ of the total the card has (also running on 64 bit Windows 7 [SP1] which does not have have the heavy WDDM load of 10).