new video card... power consuption and setup

[Sdados]

hello!
im planning to buy a geforce 570 and i would like to use it together with the 250 to have a fluid workspace during scene settings and then use them together for the final rendering.

Now... first question! i have a kraun 700w modular power supply. will it be enough to handle both cards?

how much faster is the 570 compared to the 250? for example, a scene that now render at 1sample/sec, how fast will be with the 570 more or less?

is it hard to set 2 cards inside the case and make them work correctly?... maybe a stupid question, but you never know!

last question. is better a asus 570 (305€) or a point of view 570 (300€)?

sorry for the wall of questions and thank you very much!

[Sdados]

noone can help please?... i looked in the benchmark topic... but is quite old and quite confusing. Also i would like to know what you think about the power issue. thanks

[mib2berlin]

Hi, iI wrote somthing here:
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... ops#p41667

It is not a good solution to mix two different cards in octane, it is maybe slower as with one gtx 570.

Gts 250 max 150 watt
Gtx 570 max 219 watt
So your supply is ok.

Another tread about:
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =25&t=2125

Cheers mib

[Jaberwocky]

looking at the performance info out on the GTX570 it looks to be around the same as the old GTX480 but a bit better at overclocking and it runs a bit cooler.

I would strongly suggest you use the 570 as your rendering card and re use the old 250 as a display card otherwise the 250 will hold back the 570.

Looking at it the Gainward card with the silent heatsink might be the best bet.Or possibly hold out till someone releases a 2 or 3GB version of the 570, like the Gainward 580 3GB which will be released soon.

[Sdados]

thanks for the answers!

i was also considering another solution. since youre telling me that is not good idea to use the 250 and the 570 together for rendering.

what about a double 460 or even better 560? i checked that with the same price for the 460x2 or about 100€ more for the 560x2 compared to the single 570 price, i would have a lot of power more (i think... we have in terms of FLOPS 570= 1405, 460x2 = 907x2, 560x2= 1262x2, same thing for cuda cores).

what do you think of this?

[Jaberwocky]

The only problem with 460's and possibly the 560's with octane is that currently they are not as fast as they could be.Something to do with the way Nvidia has designed the cards without going into specifics.a 460 should be almost as fast as a 470 ,however it is roughly only about 50% of the speed of the 470 so therefore you would currently need 2 of them to approach the speed of a 470 when theoretically 2 x 460's should beat a 480.Not sure what the results are with the 560 as it has only just come out.Most of us on this site with 460's are hoping that further revisions of the software may cure this.However we are not sure.My advice would be the 570 for value for money at the moment.Probably the new Gainward 2GB model as you can never have to much memory where Octane is concerned.

[Sdados]

wow... thanks i didn't know about this. i thought it was an issue in general with fermi and cuda drivers! well if there is this problem i guess that i will go for the 570. i can wait a little bit more to see if the problem will be fixed, but not too long. and yes, 2gb are for sure a good idea (i got already stucked in a couple of scene with 1gb)

however what kind of speed improvments can i expect compared to the 250?

I hope that since this is an old card, the relation between flops (705 vs 1400) is not linear, and i will get more than just 2x speed.

[GeoPappas]

however what kind of speed improvments can i expect compared to the 250?

This might help:

[Sdados]

thanks for the link, i saw it, but i thought it is a little old. i don't even know if at that time there was some problem with fermi's core number saw by octane. also quite a lot of cards are missing.

however thanks again