Dave, Texas, anyone...
I’ve been contemplating building a new computer lately, because I want to graduate from a two to a three monitor setup, as well as increase my folding power.
I have a 30 inch Extreme HD 1600p Gateway monitor that can run at 2560 X 1600 resolution(it’s only running at 1920 X 1200 now). I also have a couple of rotatable 24 inch monitors, which can run in portrait mode, at 1200 X 1920 resolution.
I have already collected two PNY GeForce 9800 GT 1GB cards on sale, which should drive each of the 24 inch monitors fine and could actually drive all three monitors together, however, I would really like to push the 30” 2560 X 1600 monitor as hard as possible, and still be able to use the two 24” monitors on either side at the same time.
For this I would like to use an ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 in CrossFire mode with itself. ( The ATI card has two GPU’s built into one device. )
The 30 inch monitor would plug into the ATI card, while each of the 24 inch monitors would plug into its own non-SLI mode 9800 GT card.
The system will run a quad core i7 processor, 6 Gigs or more of DDR3 Ram, a kilowatt power supply, and Windows XP Pro 64 (I read about Dave’s windows memory issue with running 4 cards under plain XP... ;-)
Questions:
is it possible to mix these cards like this?
The goal is to be able to drive the 30 inch monitor at high (CrossFire) frame rates without having it turn off or impact the portrait mode 24 inch monitors on either side.
Will it be possible with a setup like this to fold proteins on all four GPU’s at once? (The 2 on the ATI card, and one in each of the 9800GT’s...)
Motherboard/Power Supply/Case recommendations? (It will need three well spaced PCI-E slots... (The ATI is a double wide card.))
Alternatives to the ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 video card?
Any other thoughts or considerations?
Thanks for any help!
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/WinGPUGuide
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=3336
My first thoughts are:
Do not mix drivers from different video manufacturers in one system.
There are lots of cards that will provide for great folding. I would rather see you buy two ATI 4870 X2 cards that we know will work together, and that provide the power to hit your high resolution requirements.
Of course, it's your weekends and evenings that you'll be giving up!
Please keep us posted. We will be waiting for your GPU folding farm to hit the numbers page.