From: Aron Broom (broomsday_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2012 - 11:21:10 CDT
In terms of the bandwidth and the integrated PCI-e bridge, I think you
might get a sense from the motherboard manual, as they will generally say
something like "one at 16x or two at 8x each". I guess ideally you want to
be able to tos 4 cards in there and get 16x for all of them.
I'm also quite interested in the performance for the GTX680s. One thing to
note, although I'm not 100% certain of this, so something can correct me, I
think that without using the new PCI-e 3.0 (which the Keplers are capable
of) you'll actually have lower bandwidth with a 680 compared with a 580,
and you only get back to 580 bandwidth levels when you are using the 3.0.
~Aron
On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Blake Mertz <blake.mertz_at_mail.wvu.edu>wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm in the process of putting together a GPU workstation based off of
> a Tyan S8232GM4NR motherboard -- it's a dual-socket AMD G34, with 4
> PCI-e Gen2.0 slots that are spec'd to run at 16x
> (
> http://tyan.com/product_SKU_spec.aspx?ProductType=MB&pid=696&SKU=600000215
> ).
> My two biggest concerns are:
>
> 1) the bandwidth on my motherboard with respect to the GPUs, and
>
> 2) which commercial Nvidia GPUs I should go with.
>
> From what I can tell by Axel Kohlmeyer's response to Matt Roark's
> inquiry (
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/mailing_list/namd-l.2011-2012/3416.html
> ),
> you have to look out for motherboards with integrated "PCIe bridges",
> which I haven't been able to confirm on the S8232, either in the
> manual or from looking online. Does anyone have experience using this
> board for namd?
>
> Also, I noticed Francesco Pietra has done some testing with GTX 680s
> (which is what I happened to initially purchase), but I haven't seen
> much else on namd-l discussing these cards. Has anyone else had a
> chance to compare the 680 performance over the 580s? I've had a hard
> time judging the advantages of the new Kepler architecture over Fermi,
> especially in context of namd performance. Thanks for any help you can
> give.
>
> Blake
>
> --
> Assistant Professor
> C. Eugene Bennett Department of Chemistry
> West Virginia University
>
> "Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have
> perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe
> that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be
> attained." Marie Curie
>
> "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and
> suddenly you are doing the impossible." St. Francis of Assissi
>
>
-- Aron Broom M.Sc PhD Student Department of Chemistry University of Waterloo
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