CUDA on a PCI card?

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Any shot of using those PCI 8400's & 9400's and such for CUDA? Or will the bandwidth limitations of PCI squash that?

 

[aka1nas]

It really depends on what you are doing wih CUDA. Bandwidth-intensive CUDA apps will suck on that, yes. Some might be just fine , though.

 

[Soulkeeper]

they'll work, it won't so much be the pci bus that'll limit you but the amount of SPs
comparing one of those pci cards would be like comparing a 600MHz cpu to a 3+ Ghz quad cpu ...

 

[Denithor]

...but they will work.

Install the latest Geforce 182.06 driver, which enables CUDA & PhysX on all 8/9/200 series cards with at least 256MB of video memory.

 

[Wreckage]

It would be interesting to see folding and physics benchmarks with a PCI card.

 

[Denithor]

I've actually heard of problems with both on even an 8600GT. In the Folding forum right now there's a guy who cannot get his 8600GT to fold stably at stock speeds, keeps giving Unstable_Machine errors & crashing before completion.

And I've seen one reference (unconfirmed) saying that using an 8600GT for PhysX actually results in slower fps than just letting the main GPU do both.

 

[waffleironhead]

fwiw I experimented with running my x1950pro in folding at home(way back when it was supported). I set my pcie x16 slot to run at X1 speeds and the speed of the application was horrible. I am fuzzy on the exact numbers, but it was incredibly slow. So I would think a pci card wold be equally bad at folding. I guess it depends on how much the application relies on sending data over the bus.