Hi all,
I am interested in improving my SETI@home number crunching. Having seen the big difference in output when the BOINC software began suporting GPU cards, I was hoping to buy one of the above cards for an older computer I have, replacing one of my video cards with it.
My system is as follows:-
XP pro 32
Intel core 2 6600
2GB RAM
ASUS P5N32 deluxe motherboard
2 x GeForce 7950 GT video cards
My question is, will it work?
Thank you very much for any help provided.
Manfred
Sure, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
But C870s are the old Teslas, based on G80. Perhaps you’d be more interested in the new C1060s. I’m not even sure if they still sell the old ones.
Thank you Big Mac.
I did a search for the boards in Australia and the C870 is $1500, half the price of a C1060. Also the C870 is the only one that will work with a 32 bit OS. The C1060 needs a quad core CPU as well as an extra 4GB of RAM.
Maybe I can take my box into a store and let them plug the card in to see if it works.
Thanks again,
Manfred
That isn’t true. You only need a single core cpu to drive any of these cards, and they work equally well with 32 and 64 bit operating systems. You can buy a 1Gb GTS250 or 9800GT for less than $250 Australian which will considerably outperform the C870. You can get a 1Gb GTX285, which is a much better card for CUDA (it is probably close to four times as fast and supports a number of features the older boards don’t and double precision floating point arithmatic) for $525 from my preferred retailer in Melbourne. Any of those cards would be a better choice than a C870 at any price.
Thank you avidday. I had no idea the ordinary graphics cards you mentioned would be better than the C870, especially considering its price tag. My current computer has 2 nvidia 280 gtx cards and my seti output has trippled. I figured the C870 would crap all over that. Guess I was wrong.
Does this mean a C1060 is only twice as fast as the C870? $3000 seems a lot to pay if that is the case.
Actually, this brings up another question. Is there a chart / table that compares nvidia graphics cards with tesla ones? Would help me understand the real value of them.
Many thanks avidday. External Image
The C870 is just an “industrial strength” 8800GT with more RAM. The C1060 is just an “industrial strength GTX285” with more RAM. Both use slightly more conservative clock speeds and timings than their consumer video card counterparts and NVIDIA recommends them for production work (ie. computation clusters, render farms and the like). Other posters on these boards have benchmarked them and usually the desktop cards are about 10% faster than the Tesla equivalents. No guarantee that the desktop parts will survive years of 24/7 thrashing, but on the other hand you can buy a lot of spares or upgrade replacements with the price different between the two.
The Wikipedia page on Telsa is a good starting point.
It’s actually a version of the 8800 GTX. The 8800 GT had a smaller bus and fewer stream processors, but PCI-Express 2.0 support.
