cuda build you own 4xC1060 + 1xGTX285 on asus P6T6?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
#1

Hi,

I am planning to build a system using 4x C1060 + 1x GTX285 for display. They will all be plugged onto an Asus P6T6 motherboard, using PCIe riser (there will also be a RAID controller, so the motherboard’s 6 PCIe slots will all be populated).
… and it will run XP64.

I was just wondering if anybody had any experience about such a system? (I am already aware of the Fastra configuration, and the NVIDIA “build your own” recommendations)

I recently became kind of concerned by asus advertising support for “up to 4x CUDA cards”, one of them required to be a quadro, for their more recent P6T7 motherboard.

Can anyone reassure me and confirm it actually works on a P6T6? … or did I miss any obvious reason why it should not?

Thank you.

#2

Probably won’t work because of BIOS reasons. Might not work because of driver reasons. Will be basically unusable for real work due to horrendously low PCIe performance, but I don’t know how sensitive F@H and related apps are to PCIe bandwidth.

#3

Nope, the P6T6 motherboard won’t work for you at all… you’ll be able to physically fit only 3 double-wide cards in.
Look at the picture:
You see it has the slot count, but not the slot spacing you want.

It’s hard to find a board with spacing for 4 double wide cards, and impossible for 5.

Edit: ignore the above, I missed the fact that you want to use a PCIe riser.
Good luck, that will be an adventure just for the hardware. :-)

#4

Ooops … that is not reassuring :( … thank you for the feedback, though.

I am not too worried about the PCIe bandwidth, as my app was already scaling well using a S1070 (which uses two PCIe expansion kit at gen2(x8) speed to connect 4x1060 … if I am not (too much?) mistaken (??)) …
I was expecting the same gen2(x8) speed on each Tesla (according to the P6T6 manual) … that is if they all are recognized by the BIOS/driver.

I guess I’ll discover soon (parts are already ordered).

#5

With six cards, you’ll probably get x4 for everything.

#6

Hi,

Could you please elaborate on this a bit? I’ll soon get results for a 3x295 and 4x295 system, but do you

think that for six cards (with any avail system), you’ll only see x4 for the whole system? why?

thanks

eyal

#7

The X58 chipset only has a total of 36 PCIe lanes. 6x4 sounds logical to me.