Speed of NVIDIA GTX660
24 Sep 2012 15:49:13 UTC
Topic 196535
(moderation:
I'm inclined to buy the new graphics card NVIDIA GTX660, which seems to be a good compromise between performance, price and power consumption to me. Does anybody already have some experience with this card?
At the moment I'm using two NIVIA GTS450. Each one is consuming apprx. 100 W of electric power and does 3 BRP4 tasks at a time in about 5700 seconds, which equals one such task in 1900 s. A GTX660 has 900 cuda cores and a memory bandwidth 3 times as big as a GTS450, but needs only 1.4 times as much electric power. Since power costs in my country are crucial (running my computer one year continuously, costs me as much as 2 GTX660) I'm interested in minimizing power costs.
There are lots of speed tests about GTX660 in the web. But they all deal with the frames per second (fps) when playing certain games. This doesn't help for the assessment I need. That's why I ask in this forum.
Viele Grüße
Heinrich
Speed of NVIDIA GTX660
)
Having thought the same question I bit the bullet and bought an MSI GTX660 Ti Power Edition for £243 here in the UK this last weekend.
So far I have been hugely unimpressed by the performance of this card.
Whilst compared to your GTS450's you should see an improvement in productivity, but the slightly greater power consumption may not be worth the effort and expense!
Having said that, I can only comment on my experience with my particular hardware.
Having briefly installed the card in my i-7 machine I was shocked to see my BRP run times increase by over 20 minutes per task running 3 fold as compared to the 560Ti 448 core I had installed.
So I moved the 660Ti to an old rig that was running a GTX460 1GB with Q6600 cpu and the results have been just as poor. I have now got it to perform the same as the GTX460 but have had to free two cpu cores to feed the 660 to get there. It currently takes circa 60 mins. per task @ 3 fold.
Its only been running a couple of days and I have not had time for proper testing, but on the face of it the GTX660 has proved to be a very expensive GTX460.
If you are also a gamer the 660's will be a great upgrade but if, like me, you only use your gpu's for crunching I'd be looking back at the 5 series cards :)
Gavin.
Gavin, Thanks for that.
)
Gavin,
Thanks for that. I'm a pretty happy user of two GTX460s. As I am non-gamer, they are pretty much pure Einstein add-ons to two PCs I have for other personal use purposes.
The initial look of the GTX660 seemed so potentially promising that I toyed with the idea of "upgrading" one of my 460 hosts to it--hoping to get substantially more Einstein computation at a lower power cost per unit work.
I'll still watch for possibly more favorable reports, but your report makes it far less likely I shall pursue this option.
Interesting. I just
)
Interesting.
I just ordered a Gigabyte 670 (just to keep up with Gavin). It should arrive in a couple of days. I wish I read this first. I do think it's interesting that nVidia does not seem to publish performance numbers for the Kepler series.
I also have a Matlab Parallel Toolbox on order and expect the license to be available about the same time.
There are some benchmarking programs in the Matlab toolbox so with a bit of hardware swapping I should be able to compare their numbers for the 550ti, 560, 560ti and 670.
Does anyone know what BRP4 is using the GPU to do? Is is custom kernels or stuff out of a toolbox? I'm just curious how hard it would be to create benchmark programs tailored to that process.
I have run nVidia's test program that measures memory transfer bandwidth and all my GPU's measure pretty close to 6GB/s.
Joe
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
)
http://einsteinathome.org/node/196380
RE: Does anyone know what
)
Both :-). The BRP4 CUDA app is using the NVIDIA CUFFT library for Fast Fourier Transform, plus several custom made kernels. Some of those are compute intensive, some more memory intensive, so it's really a mix of different things.
Given that the top range Kepler cards (e.g. the GTX 680, see the top hosts statistics page) are doing quite well, I had hoped that the GTX 660 kind of scales accordingly and would perform quite well performance/price wise.
Hmmm... Can you use the GTX 660 with older drivers or does it have to be the latest one. There have been reports about a performance degradation with the latest drivers.
Cheers
HB
RE: RE: Does anyone know
)
My 670 is doing just fine with the latest WHQL driver - doing tasks in around ~30 minutes typically, with 2 SETI running at the same time (host 5744895). A few glitches with, I think, CPU over-committment - I'll keep an eye on that.
The reported slow-downs with new drivers are, I think, specific to older cards, like the 2xx series.
RE: http://einstein.phys.
)
I have been following that thread "openCL Benchmarks" but I came away with the feeling that the 670 is good bang for the buck. This thread kind of makes me wonder.
But I've already ordered one (from your favorite supplier, Tiger Direct) and I'll have some hard numbers starting next week.
Joe
Whilst the focus seems to be
)
Whilst the focus seems to be on the GTX660, there was also a GTX650 added to the range which seems interesting from the perspective of lower power consumption and a more budget friendly price. It should outperform a 550Ti for around the same capital cost but hopefully at a lower running cost.
I had a quick trawl through the top hosts list but couldn't find one yet. I guess it might take a week or two more for one to rise up through the masses and become a bit more visible. Anyone got any thoughts about how these might go?
Cheers,
Gary.
RE: I have been following
)
Which version did you order Joe?
The OC 670?
It is over $100 more than I payed for the 660Ti SC and I still like the 550Ti OC for the price and speed the way I run them.......the 660 is about 8mins faster running X2 for me.
I do have another quad core that has an older nVidia so I will upgrade to one to run Cuda's so I have to decide which card to get.
If they let me get another 550ti OC for $100 or less with free shipping I may just go that way.....since I would also have to get a new PS and add some Ram
But the 650 OC looks like a good price too.
@Alintope Anandtech has a
)
@Alintope
Anandtech has a computing test: http://tinyurl.com/8vdbmuz
But be warned that a certain card maybe faster in solving a problem than another card, in solving another problem it might be totally else.
The folding@home problem is totally different from Einstein@home.
Also take care of the brand of the card. In a certain test the dual fans MSI card was 16C cooler then the single fan EVGA card.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2023/12/
I will probably order the MSI GTX660 TF OC next week ïŠ