Dear freesurfer team

I'm currently investigating how to tweak 2 2 year old Dell 7400 Xeon machine's to run a large batch of fs jobs. Upgrading to Nehalem won't work, since it will require a new motherboard as well. However, we can replace our old non-fermi quadro card with a C2050.

As an alternative, I was thinking about buying two GTX590 (two times 580 and 1.5 GB ram) or two palit GTX580 (1 times 580 with 3GB ram) and running them in SLI. This will save quite some money, and intuitively, it feels that more separate cards will work better if you start batching more recon scripts at the same time (1 per CPU). You'll end up with 6 gb of vram in both cases compared to the 3 for the C2050, with 4 processors for the 590 and 2 for the 580. As I don't understand cuda and sli well, I may very well be completely wrong. I'm not sure fi that running jobs under sli will work well. Do you have any ideas on this solution compared to a single c2050?

thank you very much in advance,

Andries van der Leij