GPU Novice

[Terry1953]

Since I started crunching again it seems that GPU's are the way to go. Since I am a total novice with GPU"s I happened to run across this list that someone else took the time to compile. It makes things easier even for someone with my lack of knowledge.

It goes: Chip Set, Model number, weather or not it will crunch Milky Way, and streams.

ATI 4650 AGP-no 320
ATI 4670-no 320
ATI 5550-no 320
AMD 5770-no 800
AMD 5870-yes 1600
AMD 6770-no 800
AMD 6850-no 960
AMD 6870-no 1120
AMD 6950-yes 1408
AMD 6970-yes 1536
AMD 7750-yes 512
AMD 7770-yes 640
AMD 7850-no 1024
AMD 7870-no 1280
AMD 7950-yes 1792
AMD 7970-yes 2048
Nvidia 8600 GT 128
Nvidia 9800 GT/512meg 112
Nvidia 9600 GSO/ 512meg 64
Nvidia GTX 560Ti-yes 384
Nvidia 650Ti-yes 768


I have a 6850 and a 6870 (this thing is a huge monster and 2 Six pin power inputs) and both of these are MSI. The 6870 cools itself much better that the 6850 PE/OC Cyclone. Today I found a 5870 used for $150 so I sent for it. I want a 7970 but Moo isn't set up for them yet so I'll wait. I think I'm going to watch for another card like one of the ones I have and try some crossfire.

[Dirk Broer]

Hi Terry,

MilkyWay is the only project that has Double Precision as a prerequisite for all its work, and since a few months OpenCL support has come with that list, thus leaving out our trusted HD 38xx cards (:cussing:)

The HD 4xxx series has Double Precision support for the HD 47xx and HD 48xx cards and they will run OpenCL 1.0 -provided you are not too fast with updating the Ati Stream SDK to the latest AMD version.
Thus the HD 4730, HD 4750, HD 4770, HD 4830, HD 4850, HD 4860, HD 4870 and HD 4890 will run MilkyWay. I can asure you that, running a HD 4770 under 64-bit Windows 8 with Ati Stream SDK 1.4

The HD5xxx series only has DP for the HD 58xx and HD 59xx cards, so the HD 5830, HD 5850, HD 5870 and HD 5970 will run MilkyWay.

The HD 6xxx series only has DP for the HD 69xx cards, so the HD 6930, HD 6950, HD 6970 and HD 6990 will run MilkyWay.

The HD 7xxx series has DP for the HD 77xx, HD 78xx and HD 79xx, so that list is wrong about the HD 7850 and HD 7870

In the nVidia camp anything with compute capability of 1.3 and higher will do, meaning:
GeForce 2xx, but no lower than the GTX 260,
GeForce 4xx, from as low as the GT 430, but only really capable from GTS 450 and higher,
GeForce 5xx, from as low as the GT 530, but only really capable from GTS 550 and higher,
GeForce 6xx, from as low as the GT 620, but only really capable from the GT 640 and higher.

Unfortunately, good DP performance comes together with a hefty power bill. The next three cards offer the best power efficiency in DP FLOP/ Watt tdp:
HD 7970 Ghz edition: 4.35
Hd 7970: 4.12
HD 7950: 3.98

nVidia does not score better than 0.85 on the DP department (GTX 590). The Fermi's have a better DP to SP ratio than their successors, the Kepler's
When you have money to burn and are a nVidia addict you can consider buying Quadro or Tesla cards with even better DP performance, but in general you are much better off with a high end Radeon.