Mixing Compute and Gaming PC?

[njdevilsfan87]

Does anyone do this? My Titan is soon going to become a dedicated number cruncher. So I need another GPU for desktop/gaming. I'm thinking of getting a 780 or R9 290 + water block. I'm not liking where used Titan prices are right now to get a second. I'm still seeing them approach $800 on Ebay from trusted sellers, and $800 gets you 2x 290s (+$200 for water blocks).

If I get a Nvidia GPU, and cause a display driver crash while I'm running a calculation on the Titan, is it going to crash the calculation as well? If this is the case, I can get a R9 290 instead so if the AMD display driver crashes, it shouldn't affect the Titan. Just so I can play around with overclocks and not have to worry about display driver crashes also stopping my calculations.

I don't plan to run any calculations on the Titan that should take longer for a day. If I did I'd move the Titan into its own dedicated workstation to ensure maximum stability of the entire system. If I get the rare system crash as it may happen right now, I'd only lose at most hours worth of compute time. It would just be far more convenient to keep simultaneous gaming and compute together.

 

[Gryz]

If I were you, I'd first try and find out if you can actually run an nvidia and amd videocard in the same machine, at the same time. A little googling suggested that the drivers will not allow that (not under Windows at least).

Another option might be to run 2 VMs. One controlling your nvdia card, one controlling your AMD card. In theory this could work. But I bet you'll be the first one to try this.

If I were you, I'd buy a cheap cpu and motherboard, and build 2 systems. That might cost a bit more, but I expect it to save you a lot of hassle. Good luck. If you do get it to work inside one PC, let us know. I'm sure there are more people interested here.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Windows 7/8/8.1 allow multiple video card drivers to be installed at the same time. You may have more game related issues than anything else though.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I do this.

I use some CUDA apps, mainly for password cracking jobs which tend to run overnight for 4-8 hours, it was better overall better for me to buy a 2nd gtx580 and put in in SLI because then compute jobs are faster and gaming is faster, keep it all in one rig and enjoy the benefit of multi-gpu.

It means having to balance gaming and compute work though but that's something I tend to leave overnight, if your compute apps work with SLI then they're going to finish 2x faster with SLI anyway so ought to make that easier.

So personally I'd consider getting an identical card to what you have now and doing SLI.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

I don't think it's possible for a 2x speed up in my case, unless the memory sharing/swapping comes at a minimal performance loss. But, I did actually find a used Titan for a fair price ($650) so I will be doing just that. Since I have a spare EK FC-Titan block it will be going under water right away as well.

Hopefully I don't get sucked into running my CUDA calculations on both... and then end up needing another GPU again.

I think this was best my option. At least when not running calculations, I will have SLI to utilize (which can be useful for 1440@60fps or 1080p@144hz). And I shouldn't get driver related issues. I'll just have to make sure that I'm 99.99% stable for CPU and gaming GPU before I start running calculations in the background.