looking for a "Green" CUDA card...buy now, or wait ??
24 Apr 2009 18:58:30 UTC
Topic 194312
(moderation:
Hi all!
I'm looking for a CUDA card that has a low power consumption, for many reasons:
* electricity bill :-)
* "thermal control" : the room where most of my BOINC PCs are located gets pretty hot in summer ...
* I'd like to use it in a PC that has only a 350 W PSU
So...I understand there's the GeForce 9600 and 9800 "Green" or "Eco" line of products. Around 75 W of power consumption, right??
Then again, some time later this year NVIDIA will release new cards based on a a new manufacturing process, and (as rumors have it), with much more powerful double precision capabilities....
Sigh...the eternal question: buy now or wait ???
Any experiences with green CUDA cards?
CU
Bikeman
looking for a "Green" CUDA card...buy now, or wait ??
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In the past all "green" computing components are so because they assume that the computer or device will not always be used or be used at full capacity. So, they create power down modes.
BOINC runs during idle, no power down, no savings ...
YOu kinda need to look at the capability per watt which is tough at the best of times.
If you are worried about heat consider the lower end card.
If you want to balance heat and power consider a GTX295 which seems to be (finger tests) running about the same heat as GTX280 ... almost the same speed but twice the capacity (though it does draw slightly more power).
IF ETA swings by I think he has the specs at his fingertips ... prolly give better advise ...
RE: Hi all! I'm looking
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Just a little off-topic.... Planning to CUDA on upcoming MilkyWay or SETI...?
I think the NVIDIA "Green
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I think the NVIDIA "Green Line" cards do save some consumption even under load, as they are running on reduced clock rates and maybe are "undervolted" accordingly. I've ssen some that draw power from PCIe alone, no extra power connectors, so they MUST draw less power even under load.
Not decided yet, GPUgrid would be a choice as well, but they have rather strange user license terms IMHO (hey, you are not even allowed to disassemble their app :-). ). I definitely would prefer to do it under Linux.
Anyway I need to experiment with CUDA a bit myself.
CU
Bikeman
RE: Hi all! I'm looking
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I have installed a GTX 285 and it eats 90W at full use. 220Watts for the complete pc with a Q9300, 2 disks (1 not indexed), 4 fans and a 450 watts Corsair "80" (or green 80 or something)
[pre] [/pre]
Intel I7 930 - GTX 480 - Windows 7 64
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A user at SETI Beta recently
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A user at SETI Beta recently published a performance per € table.
Not what you're looking for, of course, but it may help you draw up a shortlist for energy consumption research.
Don't forget that if you want
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Don't forget that if you want any kind of hardware accelerated double precision operations in CUDA, you'll have to get a 2xx card. 9800 won't cut it..
The power specs for PCIe
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The power specs for PCIe graphic cards is, a max of 75W through the motherboard connector, and 25W per pair of wires/pins on the direct psu connectors.
So if card has 6pin connector its max power should be 75 + 75 = 150 watts.
The power for the graphics card is on the 12V line. It could be that although your psu is lightly loaded at present it may not have sufficient spare capacity on the 12V rail.
RE: I think the NVIDIA
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I started with a 9800GT card. The 1st version (has dual DVI connectors on the back) ran cooler than the 2nd more recent one I got. The old one ran GPUgrid wu in around 13 hours, the newer one in 12 hours. Temp difference was about 8 degrees between them. Supposedly they had the same specs. GPU-Z saw them as being the same card apart from the BIOS version, even though they look totally different to each other.
If you can pickup a 2nd hand one off eBay of the older version you might get away with it on your 350w power supply. I however upgraded mine to 500w 80% efficency. The minimum recommended is a 400w power supply.
I have since gone to GTS250's in 4 machines (one each) using the same power supply. Somewhat quicker (8 hours for GPUgrid now) and still the same 105w max power, however they have 2 six-pin PCIe power connectors.
BOINC blog
Thanks for all the input.
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Thanks for all the input.
I've read that the next generation of NVIDIA cards will be out only shortly before X-mas this year, I guess I don't want to wait so long. 75W is all I want to add to the heat in that "computer room" (last week I already got an alarm (by Bruce Allen's smartmon daemon, btw :-) ) that one HDD was complaining about excessive heat (55 deg C is a bit too much), so I had to optimize cooling for that host).
CU
Bikeman
It will be interesting to see
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It will be interesting to see what spec card the new cuda app will use, whenever Bernd (or whoever is coding) releases it.
The GPUgrid work tends to require a high-end card, but Seti runs on the low-end cards.
BOINC blog