Best budget GPUs for folding at home?

[Augray37]

I'm very new to folding. Like, I heard about it a couple weeks ago and here I am. It seems that Nvidia GPUs are better for folding, and I have an old athlon ii x2 linux rig sitting around. So basically, I'm looking for a cheap yet somewhat efficient/effective folding GPU. Some that I'm looking at are the GT 440, GT 550ti, 9800GT, GT 630, etc. Do any of those, or something else, pop out at you as being a good fit? I know which ones I would pick for gaming, but I'm not so sure when it comes to folding. Thank you.

 

[AstroTC]

For folding I would pick something that isn't a power hog unless ur crunching a tonne of numbers, I would go GTS 450 if you are looking to stay < $100 but If you could find a GTX 460 for cheap that would be even better

 

[matt_b]

I'm very new to folding. Like, I heard about it a couple weeks ago and here I am. It seems that Nvidia GPUs are better for folding, and I have an old athlon ii x2 linux rig sitting around. So basically, I'm looking for a cheap yet somewhat efficient/effective folding GPU. Some that I'm looking at are the GT 440, GT 550ti, 9800GT, GT 630, etc. Do any of those, or something else, pop out at you as being a good fit? I know which ones I would pick for gaming, but I'm not so sure when it comes to folding. Thank you.

The Nvidia rule to being a better folder applies to Fermi and older. The Kepler series has had a lot of DirectCompute, OpenCL, etc. stripped from the architecture
- they're true gamer cards. Always go for the newest possible, you're almost always guaranteed lower power consumption as well as the obvious performance gain. Out of that list of cards though, I'd have to pick the 550Ti as the best all-around one here. 440 is hard to find, 9800GT uses too much power for what it does compared to today, and the 630 is a rebadge (GT430 I believe???). A budget (if there is one) would be a big deciding factor, the list of cards you have is quite a range on price though.

 

[Augray37]

Best answer selected by Augray37.

 

[king smp]

GTX 460 best bang for buck folder hands down