MSI Mpower PCI-E slots

[ed^chigliak]

I'm thinking about buying an MSI Mpower Z97 motherboard and installing 3 No. graphics cards. Two GPUs are dedicated CUDA rendering cards which will sit at 100% load for extended periods and the other card will drive a dual screen setup. For CUDA rendering SLI is disabled in the NVIDA control panel so this is not a tri-SLI setup. The reason I am considering the Mpower motherboards is because it looks like I can install the graphics cards with double spacing between the two rendering GPUs. The first x16 PCI-E slot will be a single slot weakling of a graphics card and the rendering cards will be GTX 780s following recent price drops. Nvidia 9xx series cards appear to perform badly for CUDA rendering (about same as GTX 670) so although great for games and DX12 it's not a good move for me until perhaps 980Ti is released.

There are 7 PCI-E slots as below and I was planning on using slots 2, 4 & 7 which should work at x8 x4 x4 speeds. Slots 1, 3 & 6 will be disabled due to using slot 7. Do the latest Z97 motherboards generally support installing a GPU in any full length PCI-E slot? Any thoughts on the subject much appreciated.

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[ed^chigliak]

More research last night and slot 4 is PCIe 2.0 vs 2, 5 & 7 which are PCIe 3.0. A card in slot 4 will disable the x1 slots 1, 3 & 6 so the above is slightly wrong.

This build is in many ways similar to some coin mining setup. Lots of GPUs for compute on a budget. There must be half a chance I could space cards on riser cables on 4, 5 and 7 if I decide to add another card whilst keep the whole thing air cooled. Water costs too much money and effort. Maybe spread things out on an open test rig and then hide it away in a metal cabinet with a bit of sound damping for good measure. Fire proof!!

Thinking ahead I need a new PSU for this build. I have a 750W XFX Silver spare and would probably look at either EVGA or Superflower Gold rated. Overclockers seem to have an exclusinge on a Galaxy 750Ti Razer single slot so that would be my choice to drive the dual display and can add to the CUDA pool for baking images overnight.