25 April 2010

Maul pics

While Maul was off in the shop I got them to replace the graphics cards. The new ones are the evga GT240 as you can see below.



The card is a single-slot design so its possible to put 3 of them into the Asus P6T motherboard. It doesn't use any external power connectors either.


And this is what it looks like once they have all been installed into the CoolerMaster 932 case.



Another shot taken at a different angle.




And another shot from the front of the case.




Here is the GPU-Z report for them. The first two cards run at PCIe x16 speed and the third one runs at PCIe x4 speed, other than that they are identical.


Speed-wise they are slower than the GTX260's but then you can't get the GTX260's any more. They only have 96 shaders (now called cuda cores) so they are theoretically less than half the speed, but the GDDR5 memory system helps to make up for some of that. I have run some GPUgrid work that comes in over 10 hours, where a GTX295 takes 6 hours.
Another "feature" to note is that under Windows Vista and 7 you need to put vga dummy plugs onto the 3rd card before it can be used. I asked in my computer shop for one and they had never even heard of them. All they are is a couple of resistors in a vga plug to simulate load.

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