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My main box is an old but trusty Lynnfield i5 750 in a P55 LE 'board with 8 gigs of DDR3-1600 and a 1 gig Geforce GTX 550 Ti, dual-booting between Xubuntu 12.10 x64 and Win7 x64. I've decommissioned and sold a spare Core 2 Duo CPU/RAM/mobo combo recently, but am now left with a spare 512 MB 9600GT. Since the motherboard has a spare PCIe x16 slot, I've thought about throwing it in there and basically using it as a headless coprocessor, mostly for PhysX in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Unreal Tournament 3, and Cryostasis, and BOINC or a few scientific computing applications in Linux. Are there other instances where it could be useful? The system's running a nearly new Corsair 600W PSU, so that shouldn't be a big problem. Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated.

Give it to a friend who is still making do with his Intel HD graphics, then enjoy it when he buys you beers all evening?

A very snazzy doorstop.

I think the 9600GT will be most useful as a dedicated PhysX card, but can't really think of any other uses. Can F@H run on asymmetric multi-GPU setups?

Voldenuit wrote:

I think the 9600GT will be most useful as a dedicated PhysX card, but can't really think of any other uses. Can F@H run on asymmetric multi-GPU setups?

I know BOINC can - it just enumerates all GPUs in a system, queries their capabilities, and schedules workloads accordingly. But thank you for the Arkham Asylum benchmarks - this looks like it'll do a nice job there. Never mind in Cryostasis... <_<

+1 on Chrispy
Putting it in your system will do nothing except increase power draw (those old GPUs dont have modern idle routines).

Dedicated PhysX worked well back then, but with a modern card it might make things even worse (see video below):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbww3dhzK0M

jihadjoe wrote:

+1 on Chrispy
Putting it in your system will do nothing except increase power draw (those old GPUs dont have modern idle routines).

Dedicated PhysX worked well back then, but with a modern card it might make things even worse (see video below):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbww3dhzK0M

In fairness, the 9600GT's easily twice the card that 8600GTS is - I've owned and used both. But I'll try it and see what difference it makes, then conclude whether I want to keep bothering. Thanks!

Let us know what happens!