I know this is kind of ridiculous as the graphics world has long since moved on to PCI-e, but we’re interested in trying out CUDA and only have an old workstation to spare. There are certainly very cheap PCI-e CUDA-enabled cards (like the 9400GT) but are there any CUDA-enabled cards whatsoever that run on AGP or --heaven forbid-- PCI or PCIX busses? Thanks for any help, and please don’t laugh at me!
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I’ve never seen any AGP models, but it looks like you can get the 8400 GS, 9400 GT and 9500 GT in PCI form. The 9500 GT on Newegg is 32 CUDA cores clocked at 1.4 GHz, which isn’t bad.
Yes, I use a 8400GS PCI video card myself in one box (to keep the PCIe slots open for the real GPUs doing real work).
But really, please reconsider. A BRAND NEW cheapo lowend PC can be found for $300 or even less.
For that matter, buy an ION system for $200, which has a CUDA GPU built in!
The problem is that by investing even $50 in a dead end PCI card just to do experiements, you bake yourself into that dead end and will have to trash it soon anyway.
Get something more useful.
That’s a very good point. When I started with CUDA, I actually followed that route and bought a new PC with PCIe for exactly that reason. However, the PC happened to come with a GeForce 8400 graphics card, so I decided I could start on that one and could delay the upgrade until I had my program running fine on the bundled card.
Turned out that once I upgraded, I could completely throw away what I had done and start all over, since I had taken several wrong decisions based on the performance characteristics of that low end card.
If you want to develop on such a underpowered card (where your program will likely run several times slower than on a current CPU), and then successfully move to a decent GPU, you need to have a good idea about CUDA and its scaling properties. Which is rather unlikely if you’re just starting fiddling with it.
I didn’t know the 9400 and 9500 GT might actually support regular PCI in addition to PCI-e. How do I confirm that? I don’t see detailed specs anywhere, even on Nvidia’s page for those cards …
I went to Newegg.com and used their excellent product search tools to narrow down all NVIDIA cards with PCI and from the GeForce 9 series: