Hardware for GTX 295

Amir_Baruh · August 21, 2009, 9:06am

Hi

I want to buy special computer with (for) GTX 295.
What does the hardware I need?
What POWERSUPPLY? 1000W is enough?
What CPU? MOTHERBOARD?
MEMORY?

Amir

nightingx9 · August 21, 2009, 10:07am

I’m running GTX 295 on my Dell 690. Its powersupply is 1000w. But i think it’s more then enough because 295 only occupies 275w.

Motherboard: any suitable PCI-E x16 motherboard, but i suggest x58 for more device-host bandwidth.
Memory: 12G with triple channel for x58 is better

Amir_Baruh · August 21, 2009, 10:25am

What is the Max device-host bandwidth that I can get? and How?

Thanks a lot

Amir

SPWorley · August 21, 2009, 3:28pm

Probably about 5GB/sec. Using pinned memory. The i7 processor is also pretty useful to max this out, mostly because it has a high memory bandwidth by itself. Core 2 chips, even good ones, can be a CUDA transfer bottleneck just because they don’t have enough CPU bandwidth to shuffle the PCIe traffic at full speed! The i7 has ~20GB/sec and it’s not a problem. (Even unpinned memory is likely close to full speed.)

Amir_Baruh · August 22, 2009, 5:28pm

i7 processor?

SPWorley · August 22, 2009, 10:34pm

i7 processor.

Amir_Baruh · August 23, 2009, 7:18am

What about the PCIex16?

I understood that there are some kinds of it.

SPWorley · August 23, 2009, 7:28am

Ah, that’s a good point. You absolutely want a motherboard with PCIe 2.0 support. Almost all motherboards today have it, though.

The (2007) Intel P35 chipset was PCIe 1.1, but the P45 and soon-to-release P55 chipsets are both 2.0.

PCIe 2.0 gives double bandwidth compared to 1.0, assuming your CPU can feed it fast enough. The i7 is nice here because it has no problem since it has a high memory bandwidth of its own.