I have a single core P4 3.06,using XP. I'm going to add an nVidia 8500gt 1 Gig video card to my system, will this be enough to run Cuda? I only have 1 gig of ram now but will be putting another gig in when I put the video card in.Hope to meet minimum requirements at least.

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I have a single core P4 3.06,using XP. I'm going to add an nVidia 8500gt 1 Gig video card to my system, will this be enough to run Cuda? I only have 1 gig of ram now but will be putting another gig in when I put the video card in.Hope to meet minimum requirements at least.

I run the 512MB version of that card and it works well enough using drivers 181.20 on an XP system with 2Gig of ram, (though I think there won't be a problem with 1Gig). It's not a fast card, so shorties take about half an hour and average size tasks take under 2 hours.

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The only official requirements that I'm aware of is that the card has to be CUDA compliant, and it must be equipped with 256MB of graphics RAM. I do not believe more graphics RAM than that will be used.

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I run a P4 3Ghz, 2GB Memory + 8600GT setup as a dedicated cruncher. It works very well.
"Shorties" take about 14 minutes to complete, mid AR's take around 40 to 50 minutes and the dreaded VLAR's take about 2 hours to run. All at stock speeds using stock apps. GPU temperature averages 65 deg. C

For high and mid-range AR's this makes it as fast as one processor on an O/C'd E7200 that I run and about 4 times faster than the P4 itself using AK-V8. Daily credit o/p has risen to around 1900/day from 550/day. Quite a useful gain.

VLAR's take about 2 hours to complete whether using GPU or CPU so I just let them run. Ignore all the dramatic contortions of the CPU Time, Percent completed and Time to Completion graphs. If left to itself V6.08 will eventually chew it's way through a VLAR unit.

If your just using this as a cruncher, 1GB of memory is sufficient, mine only uses around 540MB.

A tip, I found that VLAR units ran 20 minutes quicker with Hyperthreading turned on on than they did with it off. I also set the graphics to 800x600 16 bit to lower the load on the card

Brodo

I run a P4 3Ghz, 2GB Memory + 8600GT setup as a dedicated cruncher. It works very well.

Just wondering, what kind of motherboard do you have?

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I run a P4 3Ghz, 2GB Memory + 8600GT setup as a dedicated cruncher. It works very well.

Just wondering, what kind of motherboard do you have?

An MSI 945GCM478, It's a cheap and very basic board, with no overclocking capabilities at all and some bugs in the BIOS. But it has a 478 socket, uses the 945GC chipset, allows a P4 to run DDR2 memory and, most importantly, has one PCIE socket.

Brodo

Ah thanks. Too bad about it being MSI. My last motherboard from them didn't last longer than 5 months before burning out. :-(

But it gives hope for when shopping around.

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I have that same MSI motherboard. While I'm not a fan of MSI, I would like to purchase another one because of another S478 chip I'd like to put to use. So far, the one I have has been working great even though it refuses to run the DDR2 RAM at 667 like the board says it supports.

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I've had one MSI that I purchased new (caught fire, not overclocking either), and two that I got from an estate auction where I couldn't see all of the property. Both of them had power issues. Eventually one burned out and the other required powering off and on multiple times (about 10) before it could be switched on and stay stable. For that reason, I never buy MSI.