Recommendation for nVidia graphics card

[danielpool]

Hi,

I'm currently planning to upgrade my system to a lynnfield core i7 860, P55 mobo and around 4GB of DDR3.

With this upgrade I'm also thinking about changing my graphics card from an ATI 4830 to an nVidia card; the reason being that (in addition to gaming) the applications I mainly use the computer for support GPGPU acceleration through either vdpau or CUDA.

As I've not got the biggest monitor in the world (res is 1680x1050) I don't need to get too silly a card, but I would like to be able to play games at the highest possible settings I can (with AA and AF on). As I've completely fallen out of touch with the H/W situation since my last upgrade I thought I'd ask the wider community on what would be a good buy for an nVidia card?

I'm looking at the GeForce GTX 260 at the moment at I think that this offers a good balance of price/performance (but I could easily be wrong), what's the general opinion on this card and the 250 or 275?

I know that I don't really need more than 1GB of RAM (I haven't the res to need such a large framebuffer), but what tends to yield the better performance a higher memory speed or a higher clock speed (as I want to use the card in GPGPU situations I'm leaning towards a higher clock speed model)?

Thanks in advance,
~Dan

 

[Guest]

one gtx 260 or better gtx 275 will be just fine for that resolution.

 

[mindless728]

why not stick to ati, between direct compute (directx) and opencl, GPGPU should be fine on ati

though if you want CUDA (or Physx), then +1 to GTX260 or 275, though its not a huge performance increase

 

[danielpool]

Guys,

Thanks for the replies and apologies for taking so long to thank you.

@Mindless: Whilst I do like the ATI card (the 4830 has a very good energy efficiency which is one of the reasons I originally bought it) a lot of the applications I use contain more extensions for CUDA than they do Stream. For example, whilst Photoshop is accelerated for both GPGPU technologies, the large majority of the plug-ins available are written for CUDA. Finally, I use Linux fairly extensively, and whilst ATI's drivers have come on in leaps and bounds they are still far from perfect and sometimes require a lot of pain just to get things working. Most importantly though, again we see the situation where vdpau acceleration has been implemented for a lot of applications but there is no ATI equivalent yet. My needs are such that I'd benefit from getting CUDA/vdpau now rather than waiting for the software situation to change ... which I'm sure will force me to buy a new card 12 months down the line

So now all I have to do is figure out how flexible the wallet is as to whether I get the 275 or 260

Just to repeat an earlier question though, does anyone know which has the greater impact on GPGPU performance, memory bandwidth or GPU speed? In a lot of cases manufacturers have changed the stock speeds of the cards and that is often the only differentiator.

Thanks again,
~Dan

 

[randomizer]

The only CUDA application I've spent real time with is a Folding@Home client. The speed difference between the 260 and the 275 is not significant in that case, but heat output apparently is. I know that my 275 gets extremely hot under heavy load, and it's noisy as hell.

 

[azconnie]

The difference between the 275 and the 260 is a single cluster. In my opinion, if your computer is functional, wait till next month and look at the GT300 (projected released date is Black Friday). If nothing else the GT200 prices will drop off alittle.