Using a card just for CUDA

[pjaroszynski]

Hello,

are there motherboards that can support two video cards at once? Preferably one of them being an onboard one.
I want to be able to use my GTX 260 card just for CUDA and handle graphics on the other one. My current mb doesn't support that and I don't really know what to look for in specs... Any idea?

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Best Regards
Piotr Jaroszyński

 

[capt_taco]

Yes, it's entirely possibly to do that on a motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots. It's mostly a driver and configuration challenge.

Unless your "other card" is an ATI 5xxx series that you already own, you're most likely going to be better off just using the GTX 260 for everything. If you have a decent nvidia card, involving a second card so you can dedicate one to PhysX/CUDA just tends to generate more heat without increasing performance, and sometimes actually slows things down. Only thing that would make sense is if you already had a powerful ATI card as your main, but absolutely needed to add the nvidia technology after the fact.

 

[pjaroszynski]

Thanks for info. So basically any motherboard with two PCIe slots should work?

I wanted to get a cheap card for graphics and use my GTX 260 for CUDA computation only under linux (having it also handle graphics at the same time causes some problems). On the other hand I do play games from time to time so on windows I would use GTX 260 for everything and just forget about the other card.

Alternatively a mainboard with onboard graphics that can support both the onboard and the external card at the same time would work, but are there any?