Intel NUC with eGPU

todorstkolev

Hi all,

I just want to share my experience purchasing a NUC and eGPU for a rendering machine. First of all, I was using a 6th Gen i7 laptop with GTX 1050Ti so this is what I compare it with. I went for a 7th Gen i7 NUC and Sonnet Breakaway Box 550 eGPU enclosure with an MSI Gaming 1070Ti inside. The NUC can render the same scene 4x faster. The 1070Ti keeps really cool and never hits the thermal throttling so even though it has 2423 CUDA cores compared to the 768 on the 1050Ti, it's not just the ratio of the cores that count into this. The eGPU is also incredibly quiet, so the only noise you can hear is the NUC because it runs on 60% of it's CPU capacity even though it rendes only on the GPU. Even then it's much more quiet than a desktop and the form factor is unbeatable (roughly 10cm x 10cm). The eGPU box is bigger, but I decided to go for that instead of the Gigabyte's AORUS Box which has a 1080 inside, because I don't trust the cooling on ITX cards.

In terms of performance, I think the 1070Ti has the biggest bang for it's bucks - it's price sits in the middle between 1070 and 1080 but has 25% more cores than 1070 and just 5% less than 1080 and the 1060 with it's 6GB RAM didn't seem enough of an upgrade over the 4GB 1050Ti. Even though some reviews mention loss of performance when used as an eGPU when gaming because of the Thunderbolt3 bandwith, I don't see that when rendering. Also you can keep it on a shelf somewhere in your home and use remote desktop connection to setup scenes and trigger batch jobs for rendering them which is perfect for people like me that use only laptops and don't have a dedicated desk with monitor, keyboard, etc.

I got the NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB M2 SSD for 850 Euros, the eGPU box for 350 Euros and the 1070Ti for 600 Euros, so the whole setup is 1800 Euros which I think is just about the price of a similar desktop but nowhere near the versatility of the NUC + eGPU. Also the eGPU box is more than capable of powering any card on the market (even the 1080Ti if the price of the damn thing falls to reasonable levels and I get to a point where I need it's 11GB RAM), so it has some upgrade potential too. The only downside is that you can't have more than 1 eGPU, but I don't think this is such an issue because I can't feed it enough scenes to utilize it 100% of the time anyway.

What would I do diffently if I have to do it again? The only thing that comes to my mind is not settling for that particular NUC. Initially I had chosen the 6th Gen i7 (4 cores / 8 threads) Skull Canyon NUC but it went out of stock and because it was Friday, I had to choose another one quickly if I wanted to get it before the weekend. That lead to getting a similar priced 7th Gen CPU, which turned out to be dual core (4 threads with hyperthreading) instead of the 4 core / 8 threads CPU I wanted. That would've kept it running on lower CPU consumption and would've redused the noise and heat on the NUC. Don't get me wrong - you can hear it only if it's perfectly quiet in the room, but would be nice if it's fans were running on lower rpm. I might try to tweak it a bit with the bios settings, but I don't want to sacrifice it's performance and remote desktop connection responsiveness during rendering, so I don't expect much to change in terms of noise/heat. BTW the GPU runs cooler than the NUC and with the long lasting fans on MSI's Gaming series cards, I expect it to live for quite a few years.

nonesuch00

Does that have a power supply build in? Do you attached the monitor you want to use with it to the eGPU box or to you NUC box somewhere?

hyteckit

Well, you are just rendering one frame, so it would make sense the eGPU through thunderbolt isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.

In gaming  you are pushing lots of data at say 60 frames a second through the thunderbolt connection.

outrider42

hyteckit said:

Well, you are just rendering one frame, so it would make sense the eGPU through thunderbolt isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.

In gaming  you are pushing lots of data at say 60 frames a second through the thunderbolt connection.

Exactly. I stress this all time. Iray is nothing like a game, so the actual interface speed between the GPU and motherboard is simply not an issue. It is not swapping data in and out constantly like a game would, so this setup you have should not effect rendering times at all. The only possible thing that may be effected would be the time it takes to send the scene to the GPU when you begin the render. But after that, it will render full speed just like any other 1070ti would.

nonesuch00

outrider42 said:

hyteckit said:

Well, you are just rendering one frame, so it would make sense the eGPU through thunderbolt isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.

In gaming  you are pushing lots of data at say 60 frames a second through the thunderbolt connection.

Exactly. I stress this all time. Iray is nothing like a game, so the actual interface speed between the GPU and motherboard is simply not an issue. It is not swapping data in and out constantly like a game would, so this setup you have should not effect rendering times at all. The only possible thing that may be effected would be the time it takes to send the scene to the GPU when you begin the render. But after that, it will render full speed just like any other 1070ti would.

Are modern games so huge that the entire game's models isn't also sent to the GPU's RAM at game initialization? Otherwise, a game is the same as a DAZ scene and from the initialization of the sending of the game's models to the GPU's RAM it's a bottleneck but from there on out only GPU render deltas would be sent to the display you'd think. Since i don't do console or PC games that come on DVDs and BRs I don't know. Also many of these games have light baked already onto different 'texture set deltas' to speed up the render delta process'.

todorstkolev

nonesuch00 said:

Does that have a power supply build in? Do you attached the monitor you want to use with it to the eGPU box or to you NUC box somewhere?

Yep, the eGPU eclosure comes with a built-in power supply which is supposed to handle even 1080Ti consumption, so you just plug the box into the wall socket, connect the thunderbolt cable and you are good to go. You only need a monitor while installing Windows - after that you can connect through remote desktop and work from your laptop. You can even start a VPN server on the NUC, forward the trafic through your router and connect from anywhere in the world. Also this way because the 1070Ti isn't driving a monitor, you can use all the RAM on it while you render.

outrider42 said:

hyteckit said:

Well, you are just rendering one frame, so it would make sense the eGPU through thunderbolt isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.

In gaming  you are pushing lots of data at say 60 frames a second through the thunderbolt connection.

Exactly. I stress this all time. Iray is nothing like a game, so the actual interface speed between the GPU and motherboard is simply not an issue. It is not swapping data in and out constantly like a game would, so this setup you have should not effect rendering times at all. The only possible thing that may be effected would be the time it takes to send the scene to the GPU when you begin the render. But after that, it will render full speed just like any other 1070ti would.

I'm not much of a gamer, but I did try to run XCOM2 and it was amazing! Maximum settings, my 4K TV was even connected to the NUC's HDMI port so the thunderbolt had to handle both the data going to the card and the rendered image back to the NUC for displaying it on the TV. No drops in the framerate whatsoever.

outrider42

nonesuch00 said:

outrider42 said:

hyteckit said:

Well, you are just rendering one frame, so it would make sense the eGPU through thunderbolt isn't going to be much of a bottleneck.

In gaming  you are pushing lots of data at say 60 frames a second through the thunderbolt connection.

Exactly. I stress this all time. Iray is nothing like a game, so the actual interface speed between the GPU and motherboard is simply not an issue. It is not swapping data in and out constantly like a game would, so this setup you have should not effect rendering times at all. The only possible thing that may be effected would be the time it takes to send the scene to the GPU when you begin the render. But after that, it will render full speed just like any other 1070ti would.

Are modern games so huge that the entire game's models isn't also sent to the GPU's RAM at game initialization? Otherwise, a game is the same as a DAZ scene and from the initialization of the sending of the game's models to the GPU's RAM it's a bottleneck but from there on out only GPU render deltas would be sent to the display you'd think. Since i don't do console or PC games that come on DVDs and BRs I don't know. Also many of these games have light baked already onto different 'texture set deltas' to speed up the render delta process'.

Modern games are in excess of 50 GB or more of disc space. Even if a game is smaller than modern VRAM sizes, they rarely load the whole game on VRAM at once. They have getting bigger for a while. DVDs cap 4.7 GB, and many Xbox 360 games came on multiple discs. The PS3 used Bluray, which capped at about 25 GB, but you can dual and even triple layer them. Metal Gear Solid 4 famously claimed to fill an entire dual layer bluray...thus about 50 GB. That was in 2008. I'd guess the average game is around 15 GB.

The current consoles sport 8 GB of memory, but only about 5 of that is video memory. The Xbox One X has the most, with 12 GB overall, with a full 8 GB video, like a 1070 or 1080. On PC, game developers cannot assume what GPUs players would have, and so target a variety of hardware and try to be optimized for as many as possible.