I've got a system that is short a graphics card because I gave away the 9800GT that was in there. Which card gives the most performance for the money? I guess it should be somewhat more future proof than my GT 240 cards as well.

Looking at prices the GTX 590 and 580 are too much. The race is between the GTX570, 560, 560ti, 470 and 460.

Gigabyte has a GTX 560 ti with WINDFORCE 2X for around $205 that is clocked at 900MHz so it is super fast, but a the card gets bad reviews due to reliability issues.

Retvari, thanks for the reply. You have some nice equipment and your credit is very impressive.

It is cool that GPU grid allows for snooping of members computers and results.

Using a 24,990 credit work unit as a reference point I checked out your systems vs mine and BikerMatt's. Here is what I discovered:

Card--Time--Operating system

580--17,210--XP
480--16,782--XP
570--16,847--Linux
460--42,498--XP

Running Linux BikerMatt's GTX570 is roughly equal to your GTX480 or GTX580 cards on the 24,990 credit work unit. With the 570 being cheaper I'm temped to go with the 570, unless these results are in error somehow.

Do you think Linux accounts for some of what we are seeing here?

Totally agree with Zoltan on this; 570 or 470 is the GPU to get.

There are lots of comparison considerations:
Linux is using the 6.14app and Windows uses the 6.15app,
Is SWAN_SYNC being used?,
CPU type and speed,
PCIE bandwidth (X4, X8, X16),
What else is being processed,
Hard drive speeds sometimes,
Operating system updates.

But all that is irrelevant, a reference GTX570 is about 4.4% faster than a reference GTX480 (and 14% more power efficient):
GTX 570 GF110 40nm Compute Capable 2.0 1405 BoincGFlops peak (1896)
GTX 480 GF100 40nm Compute Capable 2.0 1345 BoincGFlops peak (1816)

NVidia GPU Card comparisons in GFLOPS peak

Thanks for the advice! I've pretty much settled in on the GTX-570. There is a highly rated 570 that has 3 fans but it is over 11 inches long and might not fit in the box. I'll most likely measure and order tonight. Thanks again!

Ordered! The 3 fan unit was just too big. Got a Galaxy GTX-570 inbound for about $290 after rebate. The Galaxy card is shorter than most at 9 or maybe 9.3 inches which is nice.

The gtx-570 finally shipped today.

gtx-570 has arrived. Will install tonight, late.

Galaxy gtx-570 installed and running just now. Sinking its teeth into a 291-MJHARVEY_NPC2-14-50-RND6391_0 work unit. It is running a little faster than one percent a minute.

Until work unit 291-MJHARVEY_NPC2-14-50-RND6391_0 today 10-30-2011 that same system was running a GT-240 card.

bash: watch: command not found

From nVidia X Server Settings

fan speed 49%
temp 72 C

Was set to "adaptive" power savings, just changed to "max performance".

Dagorath

Comparing the first couple of work units to yours my gtx-570 is slightly slower, but that might be expected.

My system is being run by a 2.33 GHz Core-2-Duo, which is much slower than your CPU.

I could trade the 2.33 GHz Core-2-Duo for a 3.0 GHz Core-2-Duo which is currently in another system, do you think it would be worth the trouble?

Also my GPU core is running 732 MHz, did you once say yours was running 742 MHz?

I've gone in and looked at all the settings I could find in an attempt to use both CPU cores on that machine. I did find one spot where I changed 20% to 100% CPU usage but the thing is still only using one core after an update?? My other Linux box uses both cores, but it has 2 graphics cards. The Windows XP system with the single GTX-460 card is also only using 1 core...

So I think only using one core is normal behavior? BikerMatt checked his systems and they only use one core (plus a little more) per GPU. BikerMatt's better results are mostly a result of having overclocked cards while mine runs the stock speed of 732 MHz.

It won't break records, but should be able to do some serious lifting here. If you're confident with crunching on a laptop GPU (heat load).

MrS
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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002