Greetings all,

I have had some funds come in and I would like to get a few expert opinions before I make a purchase.

I bought a EVGA X58 4-way SLI Classified on Ebay in preperation for a new cruncher and I want to buy 4 vid cards.

I see the dual 295's are champ right now. Do you thing 4x GTX 480's OC will surpass the dual card GTX 295's , should I just stick with buying 4x 295's or wait until 400 series dual cards come out.

Thanks for any advice.

(price is not an option)

Keith

Why not get the new Nvidia 580's when they come out next week?

Info at:

http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/94546?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4cd0a277e76a2434,0

Why not get the new Nvidia 580's when they come out next week?

Info at:

http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/94546?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4cd0a277e76a2434,0

The 580's will be slower doing Seti than the 480's. The main reason for the refresh was to lower temperatures and unlock the full 512 SP's and allow the core and memory to work at a slightly higher speed.

Also in doing this they striped out supposedly about 3M transistors because the server number crunching parts aren't needed for gaming. IE double floating point calculations.

So if my understanding is correct they should produce less WU's per day, but play games nicely.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Hi, 4x 480 if you want max Seti wu. I got some 470 that work very nice.

I get somewhere around 15,000 to 17,000 RAC for each of my two water cooled and over clocked 480's I have, giving me 30 to 34 thousand for the two combined. My 295 never worked well, and caused stability and driver recovery problems, I believe due to the older drivers available at the time, so I don't know first hand how 1 dual 295 perfoms against 2 single 480's. Correctlty operating 295's are certainly a bigger bang for you buck. Having a dual card allows more card usage to be in a smaller area.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Well that certainly wasn't nice of Nvidia.

Why not go with the Tesla C2050/C2070 cards?

Don't the tesla cards return less results than the 295 or 480's though?

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Don't the tesla cards return less results than the 295 or 480's though?

The C2050/C2070 are most similar to the GTX 470. Same number of processors ("shaders" in graphics terms), more memory but slightly slower standard clock speeds.

To get back to the original question, at SETI Beta about 3 months ago using "Average processing rate" to judge relative speed was showing GTX 480s running the stock 6.10 cuda_fermi application as a group slightly more than twice as fast as cards in the GTX 2xx series running the stock 6.09 cuda23.

In the relatively brief time between when some generous donors helped Jason get a GTX 480 and the project adopting the special customization to not deliver VLAR work to CUDA GPUs, Jason was able to improve the speed of VLAR processing on the 480 by about 20% or so. When he has time to devote to overall improvement I expect the 480 to significantly outperform a 295.

Right now relative speed may be a matter of how much overclocking is possible on the specific GPUs procured, but looking ahead I think the 480s are the sensible choice.

                                                                  Joe

what type of motherboard do you have?

I get somewhere around 15,000 to 17,000 RAC for each of my two water cooled and over clocked 480's I have, giving me 30 to 34 thousand for the two combined. My 295 never worked well, and caused stability and driver recovery problems, I believe due to the older drivers available at the time, so I don't know first hand how 1 dual 295 perfoms against 2 single 480's. Correctlty operating 295's are certainly a bigger bang for you buck. Having a dual card allows more card usage to be in a smaller area.

Steve

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Signature space for rent. Spacious lot available immediately. Includes utilities. Inquire within.

it depends on how much cash you have ...

the 295s will be cheaper, there is a dual 580 coming though, and the main issues you will face will be power and heat...the cards are going to get very toasty and will need to be well ventilated...

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Hi Keith

if you review the top hosts

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_hosts.php
you will see that 200 series cards are still top of the pile but the 400 series are starting to climb up the table

the outages have messed with the table a lot because of lack of wu so the results are a bit all over the place - as my 4 way 295 was in about 7th and still climbing but has dropped back to 25 place or so - it climbed from zero to 7th in about 5 weeks in spite of the work shortage and in theory should be capable of fighting with Vyper and Jon for top spot when we have work again in December

but having a 4 way 295 rig i would say with the next version of the opp app things will begin to change and as the drivers mature for these cards as well

currently a 400 series card can do 2-3 wu at once compared to a 295 the does 1 per core i.e. 2 at once

so its 8 wu at once vs 8-12 wu at once for four cards each

however the 400 cards take longer per wu so the through put per hour is still strongly in the 295 favour

if you do buy the 480 make sure you get 1gig of ram version so you can run 3 wu at once

i have a dual 460 rig as well and does 3 wu per card in 30 mins or 12 wu per hour which is approx half as fast overall than my 4 way 295 rig - partly because i seem to get more credit for the longer running wu :)

having a 4 way rig the biggest issue will be heat - individually i can run the cards more overclocked but when close together the overclock has to be pulled back as the heat makes the cards fall over - i suspect that the 480 will have the same problem unless you water cool them as Steve does

for perspective i also have a single 295 rig (before the card died) that was up to 29k+ RAC range and still climbing so if this is correct a 4 way rig could get to 120k+ which is what Vyper and Jon are approximately getting - as yet have not seen a 4 way 400 series rig get close to this - but maybe you will be the first :)

for any rig running multiple cards make sure you have as fast a cpu as you can get as you will need to feed the cards i have two cores on my 4 way rig that just to do this - i think Vyper does no cpu task on his so the cpu just feeds the gpu's - having a gpu wait for work can add minutes to the run time

so what to choose well if i had my time again i would probably go for the 400 series and actually as the 460's are much better value and can easily be overclocked well into 470 territory and run much cooler - they could be a better bet. But if money is not an issue then 480's with possible water cooling would be very tempting :)

enjoy the fun of choosing your purchase :)

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Tim

what type of motherboard do you have?

I get somewhere around 15,000 to 17,000 RAC for each of my two water cooled and over clocked 480's I have, giving me 30 to 34 thousand for the two combined. My 295 never worked well, and caused stability and driver recovery problems, I believe due to the older drivers available at the time, so I don't know first hand how 1 dual 295 perfoms against 2 single 480's. Correctlty operating 295's are certainly a bigger bang for you buck. Having a dual card allows more card usage to be in a smaller area.

Steve

I use the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme motherboard.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

The 580's will be slower doing Seti than the 480's. The main reason for the refresh was to lower temperatures and unlock the full 512 SP's and allow the core and memory to work at a slightly higher speed.

Also in doing this they striped out supposedly about 3M transistors because the server number crunching parts aren't needed for gaming. IE double floating point calculations.

So if my understanding is correct they should produce less WU's per day, but play games nicely.

Seti doesn't use double precision.

Because of more SP's and higher clocks (higher default + much better to overclock) the 580 should end up faster than the 480.

But lets just wait til next week and we'll see ...

Say Keith what size psu would You say three 295 cards and an overclocked i5 750 cpu would need? I'm looking at getting an Antec 1200w psu(38A on the graphics card cables), Oh and I do work on My cpu too at the same time as the gpus(At least when We have WU's), The motherboard is an Asus P7P55D Pro(no ram yet, looking at 6GB of G.Skil). :D

Right now on My present system that uses an Asus P5K Deluxe, 4GB Patriot Viper DDR2-1066 ram, an EVGA CO-OP GTX295 and the grand daddy of all Quad core cpus the QX6700 B1(ES) cpu(which I've had since about October 2006, Before retail was out), I use an Enermax 1050w psu w/30A on the 12v cables for the gpu cards.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Say Keith what size psu would You say three 295 cards and an overclocked i5 750 cpu would need? I'm looking at getting an Antec 1200w psu(38A on the graphics card cables)

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Check that link out. Obviously it's not the end all be all of what you need, but should put you into the right neighborhood. It's always been pretty good predicting to kind of double check my thinking. It says the processor with two of those video cards should take about 674 watts under load. Not including ram, hard drives, writers, etc etc. I would imagine you could probably get away with a 1000 watt but a 1200 would give you some nice headroom.

My dual core with a 480 I run a 780 Watt and have some headroom, but those 295's will suck some juice. Nvidia specs the 295's out at 289W max power, but recommend at least a 680W in a system to keep the card and components stable.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_295_us.html

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Say Keith what size psu would You say three 295 cards and an overclocked i5 750 cpu would need? I'm looking at getting an Antec 1200w psu(38A on the graphics card cables)

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Check that link out. Obviously it's not the end all be all of what you need, but should put you into the right neighborhood. It's always been pretty good predicting to kind of double check my thinking. It says the processor with two of those video cards should take about 674 watts under load. Not including ram, hard drives, writers, etc etc. I would imagine you could probably get away with a 1000 watt but a 1200 would give you some nice headroom.

My dual core with a 480 I run a 780 Watt and have some headroom, but those 295's will suck some juice. Nvidia specs the 295's out at 289W max power, but recommend at least a 680W in a system to keep the card and components stable.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_295_us.html

There I made the links live, And Thanks I will look at them.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

vw

my 4 way 295 rig with an i7 runs very well on a 1200 Cooler master Silent pro Gold with no problems at all so your Antec should be fine

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Tim

Wow, you guys have so crazy rigs. 4x 295's I know a few gamers that would kill to have 1 of those cards lol. 1x 480 & 1x 250 is about all I can muster. Been trying to decide if I want to put my 8800 into my server with the 250 just to see if it helps / is worth it or not.

Just as a side question, what kind of case and air flow do you maintain for 4x 295's?

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

BeNt

Cooler Master HAF X (RC-942) for the case



All 295 nice and toasty :)

I had/have a 8600/256meg which did a wu in approx 45mins - at stock

so 1500 to 2000 RAC

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Tim

With some of the water blocks for the 480 (koolance for example) you can make it a single slot card. SO... if money isn't an issue i would drop 7 water cooled 480s in that classified. The fun part will be hooking up half a dozen radiators to dissipate all that heat and finding a case that holds 2 power supplies ;-)