I think what you’re wanting is:
- Solve cooling problem / transfer the “guts” of your current computer to a new case to fix cooling
- Add a second GPU
- Can you do this yourself
Let me know if this is not the case.
Your current case certainly isn’t the best one I’ve seen for airflow but I’d be a little surprised if you couldn’t get it working to acceptable levels. How many case fans do you have and which way are each of them blowing? Linus Tech Tips on youtube has several videos on case fan testing. I would start with watching those. I would have expected a PC builder to set this up right but maybe they didn’t. Are there more case fan mounting slots that you could add more fans? I couldn’t find what was included by default on your current case.
As for mounting multiple GPU’s, your motherboard can handle multiple GPU’s. Ideally you want space by where your GPU fans are to allow for proper airflow. I have seen plenty of builds where they have blocked the GPU fans but I when I did that with my GPU’s, i was not happy with the temperature results. Which 1080ti do you have? There are many variants from different manufacturers. I need more information to help answer this.
As for the question: Can you do this upgrade yourself? There are a ton of great online resources about building your own machine. Youtube would be a good resource. I personally like Linus Tech Tips on youtube and he has several building a pc guides. I believe you already have your PC built so it should be much easier to know how it goes together as you’ll have to take it apart first. I found it pretty straight forward to build my own PC after watching Youtube videos. If you’re not comfortable with doing it yourself than I would expect there is probably a local PC shop that could do the work for you at a reasonable cost. A lot of PC gamers build their own PC. If you have a gamer friend that has built their own computer you could ask them to help you out. I probably dedicated about 20-30 hours of my time building my box from research on what parts to buy, learning how to do the build and then actually building it and getting all of the software set up. Building a PC is not something you’ll be able to do in an afternoon if you’ve never done it before. I started off with a basic understanding of what all of the different components function was and how they worked together. My total experience with building PC’s prior to building my own rig for fast.ai was watching a friend build one over 10 years ago. I believe it is certainly something you can do yourself as long as you are committed to spending the time learning how to do it properly.
A few notes if you decide on doing this yourself:
- Pay attention to cable management. It does not need to be perfect by any means but if you put some thought and effort into it, it will help with cooling and maintainability.
- Pay attention to mounting your CPU to your motherboard and cooler to your CPU if you end up having to take that apart. I don’t think you should have to take that apart to get your motherboard out of your case, but if you do that is probably the most delicate thing you’ll have to do. Once you’ve watched enough guides on how to do it, it’s pretty straight forward. If you don’t do it right and don’t handle the parts correctly it wouldn’t be hard to permanently damage them.
- Sometimes you have to push a lot harder than you’d expect to get connectors, ram and video cards plugged in. If it doesn’t go in easily, triple check that you’re doing it right and then just push harder. Most things are designed so they can only be installed one way. For example, there is a notch in your ram that won’t let you install it backwards. That’s what I’m talking about when I say “triple check” you’re doing it right.
- Note the order in which the guides tell you to install things. This will make your life easier.
- Read the instructions. You probably don’t have the instructions readily available as your PC was built by someone else, but you should be able to find them online pretty easily from the manufacturer with a little bit of Googling. Some people prefer to jump in to things without reading instructions, but I would not recommend that with building a computer for your first time.
Don’t worry about the fact that your GPU’s are different and are not SLI compatible. This is only needed for gaming. If you had 2x2080ti’s you could set up NVLink between them which I read helps with training on multiple GPU’s simultaneously, but you will be just fine without that.
Here are some helpful links that I would suggest you read:
https://towardsdatascience.com/building-your-own-deep-learning-box-47b918aea1eb
https://blog.prolego.io/build-your-1st-deep-learning-rig-6f749f63798d
http://www.fast.ai/2017/11/16/what-you-need/
Hopefully that helps!