For those who are planning on buy a GPU or upgrade the old one, i'm starting this thread as a reference to help choosing the new toy(s) because when i bought mine, i didn't found good information to make a choice. Hope it helps. ^^

Index your CPU and GPU and reported BOINC remaining total time...


- Phenom II X4 965BE @ 3.4Ghz, 2 XFX Radeon HD 4770

PS_Preparation_10_3s: 00:05:28s
PS_Preparation_13_3s: 00:03:16s (_free) / 00:04:22s (_fix)
PS_Preparation_17_3s: 00:06:34s
PS_Preparation_82_2s: 00:03:16s


In crossfire, both 4770 complete 640~680 WU's/Day, credit 100k~120k/Day...

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Hi Carlos,

That are CPU runtimes you are given, not GPU runtimes, that card can't be that fast.
Normally how more expensive the card the faster, but more inportant it need to have double precision. And some very expensive cards don't have double precision.

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Greetings from,
TJ

Hi TJ,

I was very surprised aswell with the 4770 performance, earlier this year i bought a Sapphire Radeon 5770 VaporX and, of course i was very excited to start crunching... 5770 don't have DP (learned after i bought it, i just assumed it has DP as it was a fairly good card when i bought it)... As high-end cards are pretty expensive here, i was towards a Nvidia GTX 460, aprox R$ 540,00 (US$ 306,00), but meanwhile i was able to get 2x Radeon HD 4770's to test before buy (bought for R$ 210,00 each (US$ 119,00)). Also, a friend of mine had a GTX 460 that i was able to compare results with, the results where like 1/3 faster with the GTX.

Both HD 4770's in Crossfire mode performed way better then a single 4890 or GTX 460, and they where cheaper aswell. When we where doing the benchmarks, i didn't expect that 2x 4770 would perform better then a 4890 or a GTX 460, but they did, check out the results we've obtained:

Radeon HD 4890 (Low & High):


NVidia GTX 460 (Low & High)


2x Radeon HD 4770 (Low & High)



I've also captured a SS of my BOINC and made a short video crunching couple MW wu's to show the performance of the 4770's:

BOINC SS (1Mb)
BOINC Crunching Video (210Mb)


Best Regards :-)

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That are CPU runtimes you are given, not GPU runtimes, that card can't be that fast.

I was very surprised aswell with the 4770 performance

Carlos, I can confirm at least your results. I have a box with 2 x 4770 cards at 830MHz in non-crossfire mode. It's running 2 MW WUs on each GPU and averages 2:47/WU which figures to ~165K credits/day if running MW exclusively. Right now they're split evenly between MW, Collatz & Moo! For most projects it seems that two 4770 cards = one 5850.

That are CPU runtimes you are given, not GPU runtimes, that card can't be that fast.

I was very surprised aswell with the 4770 performance

Carlos, I can confirm at least your results. I have a box with 2 x 4770 cards at 830MHz in non-crossfire mode. It's running 2 MW WUs on each GPU and averages 2:47/WU which figures to ~165K credits/day if running MW exclusively. Right now they're split evenly between MW, Collatz & Moo! For most projects it seems that two 4770 cards = one 5850.

ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 4770

DirectX®10.1
512MB, GDDR5
640 Stream Processors

ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5850
1440 Stream Processing Units
GDDR5 interface with 128.0 GB/sec of memory bandwidth
DirectX®11

So yes if you can get both gpu's working together they can be as fast as a single 5850. BUT the 4770's do not support DirectX 11.0 and only have 512mb of ram, that will eventually exclude them from projects as the compatibility and memory requirements of the workunits goes up. A gpu purchase today should include a card with at least 1gb of ram, 2 gb and above being required is probably at least several years away though.

Cross-fire is not required though to make them work together obviously!! BUT trying to put dual 5770's in a machine does NOT make it a DP compatible setup!!!

I use a 560ti on this computer to run M@H +it takes just over 17 mins.to complete each task(285.66 driver). My other computer has 2 6950's in crossfire that run the same tasks,1 on each card in1min 5secs. So ati cards are 16x faster than the ati cards. Kurt

If you're going for an ATI/AMD card, the work has already been done for you. Just find the most GFLops for your dollar. You'll find all the details here:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

Note that even for a particular model, speeds will depend somewhat on what clocks speed and power limiting you use. For what its worth, I think the current sweet spot is the Gigabyte 6950 1GB: $240USD for a theoretical 2200 GFlops (single precision - double is around 500) I run them at 900MHz clock and +20% power and they generally do MW tasks in about 63 seconds.

Happy crunching!

I use a 560ti on this computer to run M@H +it takes just over 17 mins.to complete each task(285.66 driver). My other computer has 2 6950's in crossfire that run the same tasks,1 on each card in1min 5secs. So ati cards are 16x faster than the ati cards. Kurt

They are not 16x faster, its the effect of the application for the 560, and the fact that NVidia cards are severly disadvantaged at MW as their Double Precision ratio on the card is way less than AMD cards. The bottom line being you will always get poor results in comparison with NVidia cards at MW.

In terms of pure efficiency of use of the card, you will be more productive using NVidia cards on other projects that only require Single Precision Hardware, examples, by no means a full list - include Moowrapper, Collatz, Prime Grid, SETI and GPUGRID.

Regards
Zy

For what its worth, I think the current sweet spot is the Gigabyte 6950 1GB: $240USD for a theoretical 2200 GFlops (single precision - double is around 500) I run them at 900MHz clock and +20% power and they generally do MW tasks in about 63 seconds.

An even sweeter spot is an HD6950 2GB which unlocks to the full HD6970 shaders. Mine is running at 900 MHz too (no + power tune, it doesn't even com close to 250 W anyway) and crunching single 160 credits WUs in 53 s :)

That's a bit shy of 260k RAC at unperturbed 100% MW.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

An even sweeter spot is an HD6950 2GB which unlocks to the full HD6970 shaders.

Touche'. I looked for an unlockable reference design, but all the feedback (from Newegg in the States) left me unable to be sure I'd found one that was. Have you bought one recently that you've personally successfully unlocked?

I use a 560ti on this computer to run M@H +it takes just over 17 mins.to complete each task(285.66 driver). My other computer has 2 6950's in crossfire that run the same tasks,1 on each card in1min 5secs. So ati cards are 16x faster than the ati cards. Kurt

That is odd. I also have a 560ti and it takes between 5 to 6 minutes average per wu. I also have an Ati 4830 and it takes around 3 minutes per wu.