Thanks in advance for any help.

I am going to assemble a new pc that i will use for some gaming(STO and Diablo3 not to graphics intensice), i will run SETI on it whenever on... and i download/netflix quite a bit so it will be on most of the time.
So i think i will get this GeForce GTX 260
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127430

As an added boost i think i want to get:

I am also a programmer using Visual Studio.
I heard that workstation cards help with VS and other apps(my wife is into amateur graphic design). But if this card does not help SETI also then i don't think the card will be worth it since i do work at work.
Should i get the:
Quadro FX580
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133273
or
Quadro4 NVS295
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133276
or
should i get another 6gigs of ram
or
another GeForce GTX 260 for sli.

One of them is within budget so please help me chose.
I think the one that gives the best boost to SETI is the one that i want.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I am going to assemble a new pc that i will use for some gaming(STO and Diablo3 not to graphics intensice), i will run SETI on it whenever on... and i download/netflix quite a bit so it will be on most of the time.
So i think i will get this GeForce GTX 260
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127430

As an added boost i think i want to get:

I am also a programmer using Visual Studio.
I heard that workstation cards help with VS and other apps(my wife is into amateur graphic design). But if this card does not help SETI also then i don't think the card will be worth it since i do work at work.
Should i get the:
Quadro FX580
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133273
or
Quadro4 NVS295
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133276
or
should i get another 6gigs of ram
or
another GeForce GTX 260 for sli.

One of them is within budget so please help me chose.
I think the one that gives the best boost to SETI is the one that i want.

The only graphics cards that will help with S@H are ones that support CUDA, which I believe means NVidia. Unless you get a 64 bit OS, no more than 4GB total will be supported between graphics card and RAM. Of course, if you are getting a 64 bit OS, then you will not currently be able to max the OS with RAM.

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BOINC WIKI

After further research i think i will get this one.
PARKLE SXX2751792D3-VP GeForce GTX 275 1792MB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187085
its a slightly lower clock speed but 26 more cores.

Because
i shouldn't get
Quadro4 NVS295
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133276
because it doesn't have enough ram for BOINC(min 512 i saw on another thread here).

the 260 + FX580 = $169 + $189 = $360 while the 275 is $290
Im going to be using a 60plasma as primary monitor so i think i will need more memory....
Personal theory is that SLI increases heat in the case and makes the pci slot x8each rather then x16 so it will probably be as good as the 1 275.

Ill probably shell out for this experiment for later though.
Ill check in on this in about a week when i am ready to order so please post your thoughts.

I am also a programmer using Visual Studio.
I heard that workstation cards help with VS and other apps(my wife is into amateur graphic design). But if this card does not help SETI also then i don't think the card will be worth it since i do work at work.
Should i get the:
Quadro FX580
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133273
or
Quadro4 NVS295
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133276

Those high end workstation cards are usually for people into serious graphic design. Most "gamer" class cards are usually good enough for amateur graphic design without sacrificing gaming performance, whereas workstation cards are not geared for games and can often compromise performance for video accuracy needed to ensure the final product is what the artist wanted.

Both cards state they support nVidia's CUDA parallel processing platform, so both would work with SETI if you chose to go with either of them.

or
should i get another 6gigs of ram

The SETI app uses very little RAM (no more than 96MB including the screen saver portion; no more than 66MB~ish RAM without the screen saver - if running CUDA, the screen saver isn't usable) per CPU (so, for example a dual-core CPU will handle 2x that amount and a quad will use up 4x that amount). Extra RAM will not help SETI performance beyond what is required for each app per CPU.

The additional 6GB of RAM could help ensure that all your programs fit in memory while gaming or working, but as long as the game is 32bit, it can only use 2GB of system RAM at any given time (per the design of x86 32bit processors). Of course, you'll need a 64bit OS to actually address more than 4GB of total address space (including your graphics card RAM and any onboard devices built into your motherboard that need a portion of the address space).

Using a 64bit OS with 32bit or 64bit apps will help ensure there is enough address space available for large amounts of system RAM as well as large amounts of graphics RAM on your video card without worrying about your system's RAM being reduce to make space address space available (which would happen if you used a 32bit OS with lots of RAM and a video card with lots of RAM).

or
another GeForce GTX 260 for sli.

SLI can be great for gaming and video rendering, but note that you'll need to turn it off for SETI as SETI's CUDA app (written by nVidia) is not SLI compatible.

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SLI can be great for gaming and video rendering, but note that you'll need to turn it off for SETI as SETI's CUDA app (written by nVidia) is not SLI compatible.

@OzzFan,
Have you seen this thread?

F.

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SLI can be great for gaming and video rendering, but note that you'll need to turn it off for SETI as SETI's CUDA app (written by nVidia) is not SLI compatible.

@OzzFan,
Have you seen this thread?

F.

I did... but all the things I come across here, I had forgotten about it. So... make sure you use the latest official drivers and you won't have to turn off SLI. :)

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I didnt realize SETI uses that little ram....
i am very curious as to how/why that works...
Is it because there is no need or is it because they wanted to make it run on as many pcs as possible.

So would a Solid State HD be important?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609392
i wasn't going to get it cuz explensive and small capacity.

i would like to have some 5 different ~120 gig harddrives.(1st time trying this)

1 for financials so no chance of spyware/virus
1 for different unix versions to play around... (im new to unix... i thought seti would run faster there but i saw some threads that say it could actual run slower. I dont know weather there will be drivers for everything)
1 for programming/work
1 for data only(-pictures)
1 for everything else... (probably most used)

I dont want to spend money on antivirus (i use the free avast) and windows seems to need a re-fresh install every year for me anyway so i want to keep em separate so its nice and easy to clean up. Id just have to switch a cable for what i want and no way of contamination.
ill install seti on all so it runs most of the time... and ill play with performance that way too.

I didnt realize SETI uses that little ram....
i am very curious as to how/why that works...
Is it because there is no need or is it because they wanted to make it run on as many pcs as possible.

So would a Solid State HD be important?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609392
i wasn't going to get it cuz explensive and small capacity.

i would like to have some 5 different ~120 gig harddrives.(1st time trying this)

1 for financials so no chance of spyware/virus
1 for different unix versions to play around... (im new to unix... i thought seti would run faster there but i saw some threads that say it could actual run slower. I dont know weather there will be drivers for everything)
1 for programming/work
1 for data only(-pictures)
1 for everything else... (probably most used)

I dont want to spend money on antivirus (i use the free avast) and windows seems to need a re-fresh install every year for me anyway so i want to keep em separate so its nice and easy to clean up. Id just have to switch a cable for what i want and no way of contamination.
ill install seti on all so it runs most of the time... and ill play with performance that way too.

The larger the L1 and L2 caches, the better the performance is going to be. Since everything fits in RAM, the speed of the HD is of at most secondary importance.

You do want to have enough RAM to run BOINC along with whatever other programs you need to run, so more RAM (up to a point) is a good investment.

---

BOINC WIKI

I didnt realize SETI uses that little ram....
i am very curious as to how/why that works...
Is it because there is no need or is it because they wanted to make it run on as many pcs as possible.

Because the dataset being used isn't very large, and making the dataset larger hasn't proven beneficial. Even the newer AstroPulse workunits that are considerably longer in crunch time use roughly the same amount of RAM as the MultiBeam workunits.

As John said, the SETI code is very tight, therefore it is more L1/L2 cache sensitive. Large caches will yield the best performance on the CPU. CUDA tasks simply need a card with at minimal 256MB of RAM, 512MB realistically.

SETI/BOINC only write a few kibibytes to the hard drive, or even a few mebibytes which is not enough to saturate the HDD bandwidth, let alond the built-in cache on today's modern hard drives, so bigger/faster hard drives will not help performance much either.

In order of importance for SETI:

1. CPU floating point speed (or GPGPU floating point speed)
2. L1/L2 cache size & speed
3. Front side bus/Hypertransport/QuickPath Interconnect speed, which is closely tied to:
4. RAM speed & latency (the highest speed at the lowest latency is best, higher speed is of more importance than lower latency).
5. HDD controller speed


Each item down the list gives considerably less performance gains.

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I'm wondering about this too, but for an additional dedicated CUDA card, not for graphics.

I have a GTS 250. Could I stick an NVS 295 into a PCI-Ex1 slot and have it available just for BOINC?

The card has only 256MB memory, but then that would not have to be shared with graphics.

I'm sure there's some reason why this wouldn't work.

don't get any second card.
i built my rig with 1 gtx275 1792MB and have been running boinc for 3 weeks almost 24/7
i am not getting that much cuda work anyway...

and when i do get cuda work... they "say waiting to run" with like in between 30% then 60% then 90%. I think this is because it needs the cpu every once in a while for memory move and when the cpu/boinc is buisy with other processes it does not hold the regular process to get the cuda moving.... it finishes the regular process then does some cuda.

i suggest get water cooling like i did so that you can leave your cpu running 24/7.

Also i read on another thread that 256 is enough... and /\ makes me think that it will cause a lot of cpu swapping memory in out even if it does work.

don't get any second card.
i built my rig with 1 gtx275 1792MB and have been running boinc for 3 weeks almost 24/7
i am not getting that much cuda work anyway...

and when i do get cuda work... they "say waiting to run" with like in between 30% then 60% then 90%. I think this is because it needs the cpu every once in a while for memory move and when the cpu/boinc is buisy with other processes it does not hold the regular process to get the cuda moving.... it finishes the regular process then does some cuda.

i suggest get water cooling like i did so that you can leave your cpu running 24/7.

Also i read on another thread that 256 is enough... and /\ makes me think that it will cause a lot of cpu swapping memory in out even if it does work.

you might want to disregard this previous post of mine mostly because of this.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=55372

and because for the past 3 days i have been getting cuda work... i think its because i turned off regular seti work in preferances... leave only seti enchanced work on... and i also left astropulse on