Ragnar Dan wrote:Gerbil Jedidiah wrote:PPD will be increasing today. The GTX295 is in action. I forgot how loud these things are. Wonder how long I'll be able to stand it....
I'm still amazed at how much power these things eat. I'd like to get rid of at least 2 of my machines, including my main one which has become less reliable because of its extended lifespan, and replace them with something with greater output but using less power. I'm just not sure what the best idea is, not having kept up well with what's current and what's being released when.
I recently stumbled across this GeForce 200 Series article with spiffy charts on Wikipedia. Combined with the talk I seem to recall about diminishing returns with the high end cards I would probably go with a GT200b (55nm) based GeForce 260-216, if I were currently in the market. I figure a slight drop in the core clock, a considerable drop in the memory clock, and a considerable bump in the shader clock should put it right around 200 watts TDP. The additional 24 cores of the GeForce 275 might be worth the higher price. Plus a drop in the core and memory clocks should put it in the same 200 watt TDP neighborhood.
I personally hope to see "Green Econo-Boost" 40nm versions of the 250 through 285 cards once they finish making enough three billion transistor chips for those with free electricity and/or deep pockets.
Gerbil Jedidiah wrote:I think by far the best bang for the buck/watt is running the BIGADV units on an SMP client in UNIX. This would be with an i7 CPU overclocked. You'll need:
i7 920 or 930
X58 mobo (Newegg often has an ASrock mobo open box for around $100)
6GB of ram
This will do more than 20K PPD.
If you want to go the videocard route I think the GT240 is the best bang for the buck/watt. It gets about 4000PPD and uses about 40 watts over the idle power draw of your PC. (100 points per watt)
OTOH, I have no idea how much electric bill damage a 4GHz i7 9xx does, but 20,000 PPD sure sounds tempting.