PCI possible?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

I have an old pentium4 system that I would like to setup as a second CUDA system. It only has a PCI slot. PNY has a 8400GS card:

PNY VCG84512SPEB GeForce 8400 GS 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Video Card

Since 8400GS is on the list of CUDA capable processors, will this work?

  1. I don’t care about performance.

  2. The motherboads is an ASUS P4SGX-MX, 2GB PC2700 memory and a 2.8GHZ Northwood P4 CPU.

  3. Haven’t searched that much. Are there ANY PCI bus GPU’s that will work with CUDA?

The PNY card is inexpensive but I don’t want to waste time and money. Should I just upgrade it to a PCI-e motherboard?

Thanks for any input.

2

I have absolutely no idea if PCI would work. None whatsoever. With that said, it is a really bad idea–PCI-e transfer times are bad enough, and once you get to PCI transfer speeds, it would be laughable. Upgrading to PCIe is definitely the way to go, especially since the Northwood is so slow compared to current processors.

I actually kind of want to buy one now just to see the bandwidthTest results… (“100 megs a second! dude!”)

3

PNY offer one 8500GT card for PCI bus, passively cooled, 256MB 128bit RAM I believe.

I tried this with Folding@Home, gave me 650 points per day, where an nVidia 8800GT gives 4800 points per day. It also ran hot at 102 degrees celsius because air flow was bad.

This board occupies double slot width because of the large aluminum cooler.

So for performance computing this is not ideal, but for development purposes or embedded apps (IPCs) it could be a solution

4

It’s not a PCI card, but the NVS290 1x works fine with CUDA. If you’re in no hurry, that is:

Running on......

      device 0:Quadro NVS 290

Range Mode

Host to Device Bandwidth for Pinned memory

Transfer Size (Bytes)   Bandwidth(MB/s)

 33554432               165.1

Range Mode

Device to Host Bandwidth for Pinned memory

Transfer Size (Bytes)   Bandwidth(MB/s)

 33554432               204.9

Range Mode

Device to Device Bandwidth

Transfer Size (Bytes)   Bandwidth(MB/s)

 33554432               4003.7

Pageable is about the same, the overhead becomes negligible.

It does run X11 just fine w/o using a x16 slot, and that’s all we ask of it. Nice card.

5

Albatron just released an 8600GT that’s PCI. Haven’t been able to find a place to buy it yet. PCI is a actually a really good formfactor for a general-purpose accelerator. Not every app stresses bus bandwidth.

P.S. Yes, it should work, though I haven’t tried it. Nice thing about PCIe is that it’s backwards compatible at the driver/os level, so NVIDIA’s drivers ought to work. No promises, tho. (worst case, you’d have to wait for Albatron to re-release the drivers after every update)