Quadro4000 with Quadro600

[Showponystuart]

I am looking to run 3-4 monitors and currently I have a Nvidia Quadro 4000 (for cad stuff). I was wondering if I can add a quadro 600 or any other card for that matter (like nvidia gaming cards) to allow me to do this. Obviously it wouldnt be run in sli but will it work okay?

Would there be a better card to combine with the 4000? I want reasonable quality graphics (Will be running 3xU2410 and 1xU2711 dells.) but I figure most of the hard work will be done on the monitors attached to the quadro4000 card. If it does work, would it be relatively simple to do?



my current system is
CPU --------> i7 3930k overclocked to 4.5GHz
MOBO ------> ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
RAM -------> 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866MHz
HDD(1st) -> 128GB Samsung 830 Series(For programs ie windows, ansys, proe etc.)
HDD(2nd) -> 512Gb Samsung 830 Series(working drive for ANSYS simulations)
HDD(3rd) -> 1Tb WD Caviar Black (for everything else)
GPU -------> Nvidia Quadro 4000
Power -----> Corsair 1050HX
Sound card --> ASUS Xonar Essence STX (Just cause could)
Cooling --> Liquid Cooling CPU & Motherboard
OS ---------> Windows 7 ultimate

 

[drums101]

yea you would be able to add a quadro into your system just fine...the only thing is that the two cards will in no way work together to give you better performance. Are you only looking for 4 monitor capability? if so that will def give it to you and it will have 3d rendering capability on all monitors....versus if you went with a cheap card to drive two of the displays you would have to do all the work on the two that are driven by the quadro 4000 otherwise it wont be utilizing the gpu

 

[Sunius]

Yes it will work. Just insert the card and hook the monitors to it.

 

[Showponystuart]

yea you would be able to add a quadro into your system just fine...the only thing is that the two cards will in no way work together to give you better performance. Are you only looking for 4 monitor capability? if so that will def give it to you and it will have 3d rendering capability on all monitors....versus if you went with a cheap card to drive two of the displays you would have to do all the work on the two that are driven by the quadro 4000 otherwise it wont be utilizing the gpu

I have programs that utilise the the graphics card for calculations ect. So how will my computer decide which card to run the calculations on as the calculations arnt linked to specific monitors like on some rendering is.

 

[drums101]

well actually the calculations would be linked to a specific card....it would depend on what screen the calculation is being performed on....so if you have monitors a b hooked up to the 4000 and c d hooked up to the 6000 and you perform a calculation on monitor c then the 6000 will be performing the calculation. etc.

 

[Sunius]

Calculations will be performed on both cards regardless which displays the user interface for the program.

 

[Showponystuart]

lol talk about conflicting messages.

well actually the calculations would be linked to a specific card....it would depend on what screen the calculation is being performed on....so if you have monitors a b hooked up to the 4000 and c d hooked up to the 6000 and you perform a calculation on monitor c then the 6000 will be performing the calculation. etc.

So in that case, would would happen should I start the calculation on one screen and then move it to another screen?

Calculations will be performed on both cards regardless which displays the user interface for the program.

I didnt think it would choose the card due to the monitor, but I was under the impression that it would have to choose a card at some stage. particularly because the cards arnt in SLI

 

[Sunius]

SLI allow cards to render same frame at the same time. However, when you have GPU computing, you have a lot of parallel computations that don't need to be synchronized - that's why it's possible to do calculations on both without SLI.

If you're familiar with C, you can check this article:
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/DevZone/docs/html/C/doc/CUDA_C_Programming_Guide.pdf

On 3.2.11.3 part they explain multi GPU system.

In a system with multiple GPUs, all CUDA-enabled GPUs are accessible via the CUDA driver and runtime as separate devices. There are however special considerations as described below when the system is in SLI mode.

 

[Showponystuart]

SLI allow cards to render same frame at the same time. However, when you have GPU computing, you have a lot of parallel computations that don't need to be synchronized - that's why it's possible to do calculations on both without SLI

So just to clarify, if using a program utilizing GPU computing all cards will be used. For on the fly rendering, the card used will be the one that is attached to the screen being used for the rendering. So the computer never really decides to use one card or the other for calculations and rendering (excluding on the fly rendering). Is that about the gusts of it?

Just want to make sure that by getting the new card that the performance wont suffer because the computer decides to use the crappier card instead of the 4000 so slowing down certain things.

 

[Sunius]

No performance will not suffer at all. And yes, you understood me correctly.

 

[Showponystuart]

Awesome. Cheers for the help. Much appreciated.