u/ALiiEN

Looking for some advice on upgrading/replacing our render machine.

I work on a small motion design team. Three of us do 3D work, and a few years ago I built a dedicated render machine with a Threadripper CPU and 3x RTX 3080s.

Recently the GPUs started overheating. I've tested each card individually and they all still overheat, so I'm assuming the cards themselves are reaching the end of their useful life.

My original plan was to replace the GPUs with a single RTX 5090, but I suspect the older Threadripper would become a bottleneck. That would likely mean upgrading the CPU, motherboard, and possibly RAM as well.

The thing that's making me reconsider is that I recently switched from a Windows laptop to a MacBook Pro with an M5 Max and have been really impressed with it. One of my coworkers suggested that instead of rebuilding the render box, we look at a Mac Studio or Mac mini.

Most of our 3D work is done in Cinema 4D and Redshift, but we also get some fairly heavy After Effects projects. The current render machine was built mainly with GPU rendering in mind and isn't particularly great for larger AE jobs.

I'm curious what people would do in our situation:

• Rebuild the render machine around a 5090?
• Buy a Mac Studio?
• Something else entirely?

Thanks!

Currently our Render machine looks like this
AMD Threadripper 1900X
3x 3080 turbos
ASRock X399 Taichi ATX sTR4 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory
Samsung 870 Evo 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB PRO XT 75 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler

I accidentally bought a Rev B board on ebay not knowing the OLED has a slightly different layout, Ports look the same, just the physical dimensions of the board seem to have changed, any one know if I can fit in a Rev B board when a Rev D board comes with the OLED SD?

Hey everyone!

At my work a few years ago I built a render machine, it has 3 3080 Turbos. We used this setup for a good while, and only recently the cards have been screaming, even on pretty small jobs.

I took all the cards out to check them for dust, and they look fine. I tried one card in the machine at a time, and they got to 90 degrees and were screaming. Do you think the cards just got fried from running too hot so often, or maybe they need new Thermal paste applied?

wondering if we should look into fixing our current cards or look into just getting a single 5090 if it works with our current specs.

let me know what you'd do.

,Here's our current setup.

CPU

AMD Threadripper 1900X 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor

GPU
3x Gigabyte 3080 Turbo (Blower Card)

PSU

Corsair AX1600i 1600 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

RAM

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory