Hi pedro and Richard,

Thank you for the responses! The T7400 has just one gpu slot, so I'll
probably just buy the single 590, which itself is a dual card. The
2050 doesn't seem to be worth it on these older systems (ddr2, etc).

For my supervisor, what kind of performance increase should I expect
if we buy a newer nehalem system?

Regards,

Andries van der leij

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 5, 2011, at 20:21, R Edgar <freesurfer.rge@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/8/5 Pedro Paulo de Magalhães Oliveira Junior <ppj@netfilter.com.b
> r>:
>> In my experience you'll have the benefit of using two cards
>> simultaneously.
>> That means you can run two recon-all with gpu acceleration
>> simultaneously.
>> The SLI is more important for graphics (cad, gaming) than for CUDA.
>> So, I'd
>> go for 2 GTX580
>
> CUDA doesn't use SLI at all - you don't want it. So long as each card
> has enough RAM to handle one recon job, having more cards and using
> the environment variable to select the GPU is certainly the way to go.
> I don't think that Freesurfer is particularly heavy on the PCIe bus,
> so you should even be able to get one of the dual GPU cards and get
> good performance. However, Nehalem does help the data reorganisation
> required for the GPU.
>
> Richard