I just realized that I have $100 in Amazon gift certificates from Christmas that I could use to upgrade my card. This would not only be better for my gaming but would benefit CUDA too. ;-) Question is, which card would be better? 8600GT with 512mb or 9500GT with 1gb?

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

9600gt is the best money kan buy for folding/seti right now

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No it isn't, believe me ;)
My host is running Cuda with a 9600GT ... It has only 64 unified shader and the timings are to slow. Here is a post who explains that a bit.

[edit]
An other post who explains that a bit.
[/edit]

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mips per dollar even.

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Actually I bought a 9600 instead. According to the specs on paper, it's over 6x faster than my current 8400GS. I should know for sure in about two weeks.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

I am running an EVGA NVIDIA 9600 GT KO and it seems to FLY through WU's! How that compares to the other cards listed I am not sure, mine was tweaked a little by EVGA so maybe that helps a little. Take a look at their site and see what you might like.

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I have a little 8800GTS 320MB in a Q6600 quad - 6.6.2 says its 41 GFLOPS and it peels off a WU about 4x faster than main CPU does. Strangely now it only has CUDA WUs and no normal WUs. RAC has dropped for that box.
Also have a idsy-bidsy 9500M GS 512MB in a C2D laptop - 11 GFLOPS but for some reason it hasnt had a CUDA WU yet.

The Tesla C1060 card would be a nice thing.
A SLi pair of 9800GX2 cards might be a better idea, half the price with about the same-ish performance. Plus you can use it as a graphics card where the C1060 you cannot.

Looking for a meaty motherboard with 3x 2.0 PCIe-16 slots might be the start (eg. nForce 790i Ultra SLI), something that can handle the bandwidth, theres no use getting a fast-as card(s) if you cannot pump enough data to it to keep it busy.

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