which GPU card would you recommend?

Soumya Ray · Post by **Soumya Ray** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:23 pm

I am planning to invest in a GPU computing card? As an entry level into GPU, should I get a Tesla C2050 or Geforce GTX 580? The GTX580 is ofcourse lot cheaper.
Please let me know advantages or disadvantages of using either card?

Peter Eastman · Post by **Peter Eastman** » Thu Nov 25, 2010 9:17 am

I don't have personal experience with either of these cards, but it looks like the main advantages of the C2050 is more memory (roughly twice as much as the GTX 580) and support for error corrected memory. Other than that, they're very similar cards, and it looks like the GTX 580 is actually a bit faster (more cores and a higher clock rate).

If you're just getting into GPU computing, I suspect the GTX 580 would be fine, and it's certainly a lot less expensive. Just make sure that the memory it provides will be enough for your needs.

Peter

Szilard Pall · Post by **Szilard Pall** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 11:54 am

Actually, based on my recent benchmarks, the GTX 580 is up to 50% faster than the C2050 with ECC off, while with ECC on the difference is as high as 58%. Check this: http://goo.gl/zHMY

Peter Eastman · Post by **Peter Eastman** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:06 pm

Thanks, that's really interesting. And I'm surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) that ECC affects performance so much.

Have you done any tests to look at whether ECC matters for reliability? Back on the G80 generation, we found it was fairly easy to get memory errors and we had to be prepared for simulations to fail at random, but things got a lot more reliable on the G200 (Tesla) generation even without ECC. I'd be curious to know how Fermi does.

Peter

Peter Eastman · Post by **Peter Eastman** » Fri Jan 07, 2011 12:10 pm

Actually, I think I was misreading your graph. Having looked at the legend again, it appears that ECC actually has a very small impact on performance. The really big difference is between the GTX 580 and all the others.

Peter

Szilard Pall · Post by **Szilard Pall** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 5:43 pm

I haven't done extensive testing regarding the relationship between reliability and ECC. However, the On the Tesla C2050 I've been using for only for testing/benchmarking and no production runs the ECC Error count is far from 0, a great part of it must have occurred while running Gromacs with OpenMM.

Regarding the effect of ECC over performance, with ECC off the performance is up to 8% greater.

which GPU card would you recommend?

which GPU card would you recommend?

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