Workstation GPU's

[Stickman]

Are those GPU's meant for workstations any good for SETI etc?

I mean stuff like this:

http://hothardware.com/News/ATI-Introduces-Ultra-High-End-FirePro-V9800-Graphics-Card/

If so, I'm guessing the reason they're not used is that they're not cost effective?

Also... since some (like the one linked) still have monitor outputs... can you still use them for gaming?

 

[Frozennova]

AFAIK theyre no good for gaming as I think they have no display outputs, its nivida cards you want unless crunching seti, you can also flash some nvidia cards with modified workstation card bioses as the drivers seem to net better Ppd

 

[picnic]

That card has 6 display port outputs on it. Being ATI though it's currently no use for SETI and at $3k5 sounds expensive to me.

 

[Biffa]

Ati for Milkyway@home, Nvidia for just about everything else really from a crunching perspective. As for getting FirePro vs say a Vanilla 5870, unlike the Fermi architecture AMD didn't cripple the performance of the Ati consumer cards. So a FirePro won't crunch better than an 5870.

But a Tesla Fermi card has twice the double precision of the GTX4** cards. So you would get a performance boost if you could stomach the price