Assuming I am the Paul referenced...:)

None of my GPUs are over-clocked beyond what they were set to by the MFGR. Part of that is philosophy (since I am interested in accurate science I have trouble with the idea of running my system's components in potentially unstable portions of the "flight-envelope" of that component), and the other is quite simply heat ... I already have a situation where the room gets too hot as it is ... OC would just make a bad situation worse ...

So, it is quite probable, as ETA notes/implies, that I could get higher performance as well had I chosen to do so ...

So, the comparison is of OC vs. stock ... let the argument continue ... :)

Measured the actual idle power consumption of my GTX470 to only be 28W (this includes the power used by the motherboard to support the card).

Measured actual power usage difference of 4 GT240s when natively clocked and OC'd to; GPU 610MHz, GDDR5 1800MHz, Shaders 1625MHz:
9W total (yes that is for All 4 cards combined)!

Measured actual power usage of the above 4 overclocked GT240s when running GPUGrid tasks:
System used 340W when crunching GPUGrid tasks
System used 190W when not crunching GPUGrid tasks

Did that while crunching 3 CPU tasks, and then without CPU tasks:
299W crunching only GPUGrid tasks
145W crunching no tasks of any kind

Each costs the system 10W when idle, so the total Watt usage of 4 OC'd GT240's crunching on GPUGrid is 192W.
Four natively clocked cards use about 183W.

These figures should transfer well into other systems. But people should be more concerned about overall system efficiency than the card. A GT240 in an i7-980X is a poorly balanced system.

I'm going to look at the actual performance difference from one of the cards when natively clocked to the other overclocked cards, to see what I get for that extra 9W.

Well,
It would appear that under Vista, with optimized conditions and using Four natively clocked GT240's (GDDR5), you could get 53K per day at GPUGrid, as is.

Four overclocked GT240's could bring 56K, as is (several restarts may have held these figures back),
and the Beta app (6.22) could see 66K with 4 overclocked GT240's (again on Vista).

If XP is 11% faster, as reported;
4 natively clocked GT240's could get 58K per day on XP
and 4 OC'd GT240's could get 62K per day (72K with the new app).

i'd like to say hi to everyone, it's my first post on this forum.

i'm going to chime in on my numbers, but i don't want to add any more fuel. i was looking for a crunching card only and didn't know what to pick. i should have seen these forums and this thread sooner, as it would have saved me a lot of time. i did my own research and based on the specs, power consumption, and price, i concluded myself that the gt240 is the best value.

when i plugged it in and after it returned a few WU, the results were better than i expected. on win7 64bit and while the CPU was crunching at 100% for WCG as well, this card finished a WU in exactly 8 hours for 5145 points. at this rate, it's at least 15k/day. after slightly OC'ing it and running beta units only, i finish a WU in 21.7 minutes for 281 points. this is projection of 18.7k points per day.

with 4 of these, that's 60k/day for regular WU, and 75k/day for beta WU's. if i OC higher, use linux/XP, or pull off WCG to dedicated a CPU thread per GPU, then that will be a huge performance boost also. i don't have a gtx295 to compare using the same exact parameters, but from the results posted so far, 4 of these budget cards beats the 295 in price (got mine for $50 AR), power consumption (mine loads at 45w) , and computational power (15k/day per card).

Welcome to the forum,

Like your numbers :)

You are bringing some good systems with you.

Your GTX480 should do well in that 17-930, especially if you leave a thread free for it.

SK, the additional ~45W under GPU-Grid load you measured for a GT240 match very well to the power consumption number posted in that article - very nice!

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

My position on 4x GT240 vs 1x GTX295:

Looks like roughly a tie except for one thing...

The GTX295 is about $500 while you can pick up a GDDR5 GT240 for $45-$60 each (after rebate).

Just ordered an XFX GT240 for $85 with 2 free softwares and a $30 rebate. Total cost after rebate $55 (free shipping, no tax).

Unfortunately rebates tend to be limited per household so I only got one.

My Gigabyte GDDR5 GT240 was only $45 after rebate.

At $55 each, 4 GT240 cards would cost $220.

Then again the GTX295 will fit in a single slot motherboard which are cheaper than the 4 slot main boards it would take to run 4x GT240s. Still 4x GT240s would end up being quite a bit cheaper...

If anyone is interested in the XFX GT240 @ $55 (after rebate):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150452

Several GT240 being so much cheaper is probably the point why the comparison has been brought up in the first place. And I think real GPU-Grid power consumption also favors the newer cards, by quite a margin.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

My four GT240s are now crunching 6.72 tasks (had to use an older driver on Vista 64bit). With only the shaders clocked high (1600MHz, the GPU core and RAM is native), these 4 cards could could get over 70K credits per day, on Vista! 86400/33000*6756=70.7K

- 2336422 1476441 15 May 2010 17:56:50 UTC 16 May 2010 3:12:30 UTC Completed and validated 32,999.91 3,178.07 4,503.74 6,755.61 Full-atom molecular dynamics v6.72 (cuda)