Whats the best bang for the least amount right now?

If I'm going to build a 7 card "frankencomputer" for grid computing, 7 top end 590's is down right unrealistic. (Wife would murder me.. and I like living..)

But 7 gtx285's isn't as you can get one of those on ebay for $60...

I probably wouldn't want to go any higher than $150 per card for the first iteration of this thing.. what would you guys recommend?

Compute Capability is a key factor, so only choose from the Geforce GTX 590, 580, 570, 480, 560 Ti (448), 470, and 465.

GTX295's can be tricky, and uses a lot of power relative to it's performance. Probably not a good buy now. Personally I would not over-invest right now; GF600 series are due out within the next few months. So get a few cards together, but keep a few spaces. Also, when the GF600's turn up, the price of the GF500 series will start to drop, and you will start seeing some good second hand cards for not a lot of money. Then there is the prospect of AMD's latest GPU's being usable.

Right now, probably the best crunching cards for purchase price (new and second hand) would be the GTX 470, 560 Ti (448) and 570.

As always skgiven good stuff..

I have some 285's lying around (as well as some old mobo's) so I figure I'll start with that just to get the framework going and experiment without doing any serious investing yet.. I have enough spare parts that I can do it on the cheap for now..

Sounds good, if you already have the 285's (*). Certainly don't buy any more of them, as they're less power efficient than the cards SK mentioned.

MrS

(*) Why the **** are they just lying around?! ;)

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

(*) Why the **** are they just lying around?! ;)

haha.. Well they only recently came available.. I have been stalling building my wife a new computer (read: she wouldn't let me until hers died) and she had a pair of 285's in there going mostly unused (read: she wouldn't let me run gpugrid on them at night.. *sigh*)..

To be fair, she's actually a fairly active gamer chick so they got good use, but now that I built her a new system... they are mine.. my preciousesesses... er something like that.

A fine example of give and take :)

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I have a shiny GTX 260 you can have for cheap. It only has a few quintillion calculations on it, it's practically new!

That sounds funny :D

In my case it's actually mostly the other way around: when a GPU becomes too slow or inefficient for crunching I pass them on to someone I know who's looking for a better budget-gaming card. It's getting more difficult now though, as the cards become more powerful (-> PSU, case cooling).

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002