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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Help with picking a new V card

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mymbtheduke
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Message 27268 - Posted: 10 Nov 2012 | 16:43:52 UTC

I have been struggling with what to get to replace my 560ti. The 6xx series doesn't seem to do GPU compute well. At least from I have read on the forums. And I can get a GTX 580 for around $250. I have an X6 CPU with 16gig and 1600Mhz RAM if that helps. I am not too happy with the power consumption of the 580 but it seems to be the one that will give me max through put on this machine. I like Nvidia as I can do GPUGrid, WCG GPU and POEM. I like Healthcare work.

Finally, I saw on this forum that the 560ti only uses 256 cores for GPUGrid. Really? Why is that?

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Message 27269 - Posted: 10 Nov 2012 | 16:56:45 UTC - in response to Message 27268.

If you mainly want to crunch here then a GTX660Ti is the card to get. If you want good CUDA performance at other projects I suggest you ask there. The GTX660Ti would do more work here, cost about the same and would cost less to run.

The last 1/3rd of the shaders can only be used under some circumstances by some applications and even then not entirely.

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Message 27272 - Posted: 10 Nov 2012 | 19:56:32 UTC

As SK said.. GTX580 may still be the fastest here, but GTX6xx are far more power efficient. And a GTX660Ti rocks on POEM (mine was top host for a short time :D ).

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Message 27273 - Posted: 10 Nov 2012 | 20:13:08 UTC

GTX 660 Ti is highly recommended. I have 6 of the Gigabyte OC versions. Averaged over 2 million points per day including two GTX 470 (took about 8 days off for my team WCG "super computer" week).
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Message 27277 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 1:32:40 UTC - in response to Message 27269.

If you mainly want to crunch here then a GTX660Ti is the card to get. If you want good CUDA performance at other projects I suggest you ask there. The GTX660Ti would do more work here, cost about the same and would cost less to run.

The last 1/3rd of the shaders can only be used under some circumstances by some applications and even then not entirely.



Thanks for the response. Why are the last 1/3rd left out? What is doing that? GPUGrid? Boinc? Guess I will look into the 660ti.

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Message 27278 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 2:10:12 UTC - in response to Message 27277.

Another thing that has me concerned is I want to find data that tells me that the 660ti will increase my performance over the 560ti. As it runs now the total system power for just GPUGrid is 225W. When I snooze GPU it is 95W. So the 560ti is taking 130W for Grid. From what I read the 660 will take 150 to 170W. So what should I expect for an increase in performance? 25%, 50%

I just want to be sure before I replace a card that I got three months ago for $140 with a $270 card. I can get a 580 for $225-$250.

Thanks as always.

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Message 27279 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 10:37:25 UTC - in response to Message 27278.
Last modified: 11 Nov 2012 | 10:47:02 UTC

Note that there are two versions of the GTX560Ti:
The GTX560 Ti and the GTX560Ti 448.
The non-448 version only uses 2/3rds of its 384 shaders.

Which card you have?

A GTX580 would get through around 90% more work than the 384 version, but only about 15% more than the (210W TDP) 448 version, which can use all its shaders (cuda cores). This is down to Compute Capability (CC); the 580 is CC2.0 while the 560Ti (384) is CC2.1. All GF600 cards are the same (CC3.0), but this is more equivalent to CC2.1 due to shader access structure.

Note that when the GPU is idle it's still using some power. So the actual power consumption of the GPU is 130W plus the idle wattage.

A GTX 660 Ti should be significantly faster (perhaps 40% or more) than the 384 version and should use slightly less power; 150W TDP vs 170W TDP for the 560Ti (though there is more to it than that).

The GTX580 would do about the same amount of work as a GTX660Ti, and costs less, but would require about 30% more power to run.

I wouldn't bother 'upgrading' a GTX560Ti448 for ~15% more performance here.

For GPUGrid there is not much between the GTX660Ti and a GTX580, but I would probably get the newer card as it uses less power.
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Message 27281 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 11:36:54 UTC

This "1/3 of shaders unused" depends on the GPU-Grid code. NVidia implemented these additional shaders at relatively little cost (for them), but in order to use them the code must fullfil special conditions (topic "superscalar execution" - I coul give you further links if you're interested). This works to some extend in games, but not at GPU-Grid. Not that this applies to most chips/cards from the 400, 500 and 600 series. Only the flag ship chips have been exceptions: GTX480, GTX470, GTX465, GTX590, GTX580, GTX570 and "GTX560 448 cores edition".

If you wouldn't be able to properly reuse or sell your current GTX560Ti I wouldn't bother upgrading.

Although.. I think I can give you a good comparison point, since I've been running GPU-Grid on my GTX660Ti for the last 2 days. I've got WUs similar to the one you comleted in 8811 s (11250 credits). My system is idling at ~60 W, if I remeber correctly. Power draw running just GPU-Grid is 205 or 220 W (saw both numbers - maybe due to different WUs?). One CPU core and the memory controller are active, which requires about 30 W (as software tells me for my i7). The PSU is about 91% efficient, so all in all the GPU should use approximately (205-60-30)*0.91 = 105 W, or at maximum (220-60-30)*0.91 = 118 W.

At 1.19 GHz (maximum turbo stock GPU clock) these tasks require about 5700 +/- 100 s, with 50 MHz more I'm at ~5550 s at similar power consumption. I can run POEM at 1.33 GHz, but don't know yet about GPU-Grid.

One could also run the GPU at less than "full throttle". At maximum turbo the GPU voltage is pushed up to 1.175 V, which is nice for performance but not good for efficiency. Stock operation is approximately 1.0 GHz at 1.00 V. On should get a few 10 more MHz out of this. In this case power consumption should drop by ~40% with relatively little performance loss (~15%). You can't do this with Fermi GPUs since these usually already run at <1.00 V to keep efficiency somewhat in check.

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Message 27283 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 12:59:15 UTC - in response to Message 27281.

Excellent responses above. That is what I was hoping to learn from this thread. I will check out the sales on the 660ti and re-purpose my 560ti in my Athlon 64 PC.

Where do I learn about the differences between Compute 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0?

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Message 27284 - Posted: 11 Nov 2012 | 15:07:42 UTC - in response to Message 27283.

Where do I learn about the differences between Compute 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0?

This should be a good starting point. the principle is the same for Kepler as for Fermi, just the number of shaders and shader blocks (actually, pretty much all units) are higher in each Kepler "Multiprocessor" (SMX).

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