New PCI/PCIe based GT520 cards
5 Oct 2011 21:14:39 UTC
Topic 195999
(moderation:
A few days ago I saw that zotac was introducing PCI and PCI 1x based GT520 cards for use in older PCs. My first thought was "sweet, GPUs in my old PC". Would it even work? With winter coming I figured the 1.5GHz dell with a card or two might make a nice space heater in my basement, but only if it could crunch a lot of units.
http://www.zotacusa.com/geforce-gt-520-zt-50610-10l.html
New PCI/PCIe based GT520 cards
)
I'd rather have the GT430, it has twice the Cores than the GT520: http://www.zotacusa.com/geforce-gt-430-zt-40605-10l.html and is also available in PCIe 1x
Presently Crunching here on a PCI 8400 GS: http://einsteinathome.org/host/2355855
Claggy
430's can be found for as low
)
430's can be found for as low as $55 on newegg so you're paying a major price premium for interfacing with the PCI bus. Also, with high end cards having a noticable performance hit on E@H from 8x PCIe instead of 16x I suspect that falling all the way down to PCI (roughly 1x PCIe equivalent) would hurt the performance of even fairly modest cards like the 430 and 520.
Does anybody knows if there
)
Does anybody knows if there are driver issues then with installed NVIDIA PCIe cards? So i mean one of my boxes runs a 8800GT and a 9800GTX with i think 266 driver version. I think standart driverpack dont have a PCI Driver for 430 PCI? SOoo when i must install a special driver perhaps(?), do the other two cards run? ^^
I think too the 430 is better then the 520.
Any experience with such constellations?
DSKAG Austria Research Team: [LINK]http://www.research.dskag.at[/LINK]
RE: Does anybody knows if
)
I'm running the Normal 266.58 driver with my PCI 8400 GS, the GT430, the 8800GT and 9800GTX will also run with this driver, getting a GT520 to run will involve finding a driver that the other GPU's can run too.
(and if that involves running a 270 and later driver, make sure Boinc doesn't suspend GPU running when active, etc, otherwise GPU downclocking may occur.)
Claggy
It sounds like the PCI could
)
It sounds like the PCI could be a huge bottleneck. If my goal was to use HDMI on this old box than I'd still probably go ahead and do it and then see what extra computing I could get, but probably not worth it for just $/computation.
Thanks!
RE: It sounds like the PCI
)
Don't think using the PCI bus is a huge bottleneck, GPU usage on the 8400 GS is 95 to 99% with BRP4, and this one a host doing Collatz on a AGP HD4650 too,
Claggy
RE: With winter coming I
)
Unfortunately not...just ca 30 W of heating from the card, same as a small light bulb :-).
Seriously, I think this is a nice product for older PCs and well worth trying out. Thanks for sharing this info here.
48 CUDA cores are not that many, but comparable to what many notebooks will have, e.g. the one I'm typing on now
http://einsteinathome.org/host/2631392
Your older PC with PCI bus would have slower crunching times than this notebook, but anyway, if this works (check the CUDA logo on the box maybe), it would be a nice way to speed up an old host. If you do this, please let us know about the results.
Cheers
HB
The space heater part was a
)
The space heater part was a bit of a joke. I haven't had a chance to do to many geeky things at home for awhile, so I'll probably get one of the cards suggested and see how far I can push the box. I'm also looking at getting a used Tesla card for fun too, I have a different PC that I think has the right slots open.
RE: RE: It sounds like
)
It may be bottleneck however. Even if I am switching from PCIE X16 to PCIE X8 (just to insert another card in the vacant slot) I'm loosing about 5% of RAC.
PCIE X4 is about 15% for BPR4 WUs. However Milkyway or Collatz are not so sensitive to the bus speed.
RE: RE: Does anybody
)
OK i was only awared of it because one of my ATI 3850´s (for MW) need special drivers, becuase it was AGP and not PCIe. So i through that too with PCI and PCIe Cards in the same System.
DSKAG Austria Research Team: [LINK]http://www.research.dskag.at[/LINK]