Galaxy GeForce 9800GT

When the whole "SETI on CUDA" idea first came about I bought a second-hand 8600GT just to see how the concept worked. A couple of months down the line, I have come to realize that ordinary CPUs aren't going to keep pace with CUDA (and other future GPU standards). So when the Australian government recently announced their financial stimulus package, I decided that this was a loop-hole I could use to upgrade the "farm" without a budget.


A brand new Galaxy branded GeForce 9800GT is the result! The specs are as follows:


Stream Processors: 112
Memory: 512MB
Texture Fill Rate (billions/sec): 33.6
Memory Bandwidth: (GB/sec): 57.6

As the majority of my PCs still use AGP slots, the options of where to install the new card are limited. As a result, I also bought a 460W power-supply to upgrade the 64-bit AMD based Linux machine at the office. This system runs the Squid proxy as well as an anti-virus proxy and does the backups of the file server each night. For this reason, it runs 24/7 and has a fast ADSL2+ internet connection.

The down side so far is that the Nvidia drivers for this OS only go up to version 167, so after some time on Google, I found a site that allowed me to download 180.44 drives for amd64 architecture.

As I cant take this machine down during office hours as I risk the ire of the Facebook junkies in the building, I am hoping to spend an hour or two at work over the Easter weekend and see if I can get it up and running... but have learnt from experience that these things are never as easy as they seem!