[offtopic] Low budget but good NVIDIA GTX cards.

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D.J.Peters
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[offtopic] Low budget but good NVIDIA GTX cards.

Post by D.J.Peters »

Sometimes I used 8 PC's as a cluster render mini farm with OpenCL and FreeBASIC or run 8 instances of mitsuba on my local network.
I used my old GT 240, GT 610, Radeon HD 4650 and 32 shared Intel cores in the past.

Now it was time to upgrade the GPU power in my mini cluster for a small budget.

I found out low budget doesn't mean low GPU performance at all and low NVIDIA GTX number can be faster than a high GTX number.
For example the GPU power as number cruncher of a GTX 580 are better than GTX 750 etc.

How ever I added more GPU power with 4 used NVIDIA cards for only 70€ !!! 2 x GTX 480 (2*20€=40) and 2 x GTX 570 (2*15€=30)

Note: if you run GPU clusters may be 24 hours per day it makes sense to compare the GPU power per W/power :-)
For example the performance of GTX 750, 570 and 650 Ti Boost are near the same but not the power consumption !

Joshy

Here are the ranking of low budget GTX GPU's take a look how far right my oldies are :-)
(every space to the right is a 10 in performance ranking

Code: Select all

187 GTX 1050 Ti (1GB new 50€) (4GB new 200€)
  200 GTX 770
    213 GTX 950
    218 GTX 1050
      245 GTX 580
       253 GTX 660 Ti
        266 GTX 480
         272 GTX 660
         275 GTX 750 Ti
          284 GTX 570
             312 GTX 750
             315 GTX 650 Ti Boost
             316 GTX 590
              325 GTX 470
                340 GTX 560 Ti
                   368 GTX 460 (<--- don't buy the 768MB version if you can get 1-2GB for the same money !)
                   369 GTX 560
                    374 GTX 465
                     388 GTX 650 Ti
                      393 GTX 950A
                       405 GTX 460
                         429 GTX 460 V2
                          430 GTX 560 SE
                           446 GTX 460 SE
                              472 GTX 650
                                499 GTX 550 Ti
                                 501 GTX 285
                                                              794 GT 240 <-- I was so proud if I got this runner
                                                                                      925 GT 610 <-- what a slow grandpa
                                                                                              980 ATI Radeon HD 4650 <--- ATI what a joke ;-)
Last edited by D.J.Peters on Jun 24, 2021 16:07, edited 2 times in total.
marcov
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Re: [offtopic] Low budget but good NVIDIA GTX cards.

Post by marcov »

Note that you need to offset that for the cost of extra (heavy) powersupplies. IIRC a GTX 750 can even work with just the power provided via pci-express. And fanless (the 710's big feature) is of course directly important to keep noise down.

But I mostly kept track of videocards for my applications at work (that have opengl layered and annotated images), but nearly everything is good enough nowadays. (only some older cards like the lower entries in the Radeon 5000 series have a very slow geometry shader, and APUs before the core 4xxx series)

Cheap, fanless is paramount. Usually we only use discrete cards if the CPU we want doesn't have internal GFX, usually i5 or Ryzen 5's that we buy because bigger caches or memory bandwidths.
D.J.Peters
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Joined: May 28, 2005 3:28
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Re: [offtopic] Low budget but good NVIDIA GTX cards.

Post by D.J.Peters »

(I added the GTX 950, GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti to the list above)

Today I got a new low budget GTX 1050 Ti 1GB for 50€ inc. shipping from AliExpress (4GB = 200€)
In scope of number crunching/ray tracing via OpenCL or shadertoy fun WebGL (OpenGL ES) ...it's a runner for this low price.

Note: the 1GB GTX 1050 Ti cost the same as the 1GB none Ti version but is 30 points faster in the performance ranking !

Joshy
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