what crunches faster?

The 9800GT, because it can actually crunch for GPUGRID. The Quadro FX3400 is based on the NV45GL chip, which is not a unified shader card. Therefore, it cannot be used for any of the BOINC DC projects. Perhaps you mean the G92-based FX3700? If so, they will be roughly the same.

In general, the GeForce gaming cards will be faster than Quadro cards having the same shader numbers due to the latter having very low stock shader clocking. When clocked the same, there will be no difference.

Yea, I am cobbling together some old parts and I meant the chips I wrote on there. Had 2 cards laying around from old computers and didnt even think to check if they both could run CUDA apps.

just becasue I am new at GPU processing, do I need to leave the power settings to never turn the monitor off? I assume if I remove power to the GPU after 20 min or whatever the default is, that would defeat the point

Power to the monitor and GPU are different...you should be able to set the power to go off on the monitor without affecting you ability to crunch.