Is 9800 GX2 beneficial ?

Hello,

Official nvidia spec says that gx2 has 256 stream processors and 512-bit memory interface. Is it ‘true’ or simply some kind of merketing trick and usual sales verbal magic ?

Say, if the buget is not limited - what should be bought: 8800 Ultra or GX2?

Thank you in advance.

The GX2 is 2 boards sandwiched together. Each board only has 128 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface. To use the full potential of the GX2, you must be able to split your algorithm across 2 independant GPUs.

Assuming you will only be running on one of the 2 GPUs in the GX2, choosing between the 8800 Ultra and the 9800 GX2 depends on your application. The 8800 Ultra has a lot more memory bandwidth, so it is the clear choice for memory bound applications. Applications that perform very little memory accesses but a lot of floating point operations may perform better on 1 GPU in the 9800 GX2.

You should also consider that the GX2 contains compute capability 1.1 chips which gives you asynchronous memory copies from and to the GPU. And it’s also a PCIe Gen2 device which gives you up to twice the memory bandwidth from host to device.

Thank you, everything is clear now.