Graphics coprocessors (GPUs)
In the great scheme of processing SETI@Home radio telescope data since 1999 April 12, I have mostly relied on well-behind-the-leading-edge of computer hardware.
A few months ago I was fortunate to get an apple Imac with a builtin Graphics coprocessor, an AMD ATI Radeon HD 6750M (512MB), which boosts the daily average credit by about 1200 units.
Yesterday we picked up another hand-me-down box that needed a video card and it seems that most video cards these days are PCI-express bus based. I found one for $30, NVIDIA GeForce 210 (1024MB), plugged it into the box along with 2gb of DDR2 RAM ($30) and an old SATA drive ($free) and presto-chango the box is up and running SETI@Home.
Now we just have to wait for the first work units to process through to find out just how fast the box really is. Under the hood it is still an old Pentium4 running at 3.2GHz running Windows 7.
This “new” box replaces an older Pentium4 @ 1.7Ghz with 768mb of RAM and an 80Gb IDE drive. A regular AGP based video card rounded out the hardware. The “new” box should outperform the old one in every aspect.
July 19 update: still working through over 60 MS Updates and other configuration issues. Still no real results to look at.