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4x6990, ATI Stream computer for research.

K

Kanaric

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 19, 2005
Messages
325
I'm tasked with building a computer for ATI Stream based applications and was wondering if its possible to use 4x6990 in one computer and what minimum I would need for processor?

The application we are using only cares about the GPU, for example on our 2x6970 computer this will be the bigger brother of we have a 3ghz Athlon II x2 250. We are going to sell this to a coworker and try to build this monster.

My concerns are:
Fitting them into the same machine, which I believe I can do.
Finding a adequate power supply.
Findind an appropriate motherboard.

I assume a 4x PCI-E 2.0 board where 2 of the slots will be 8x would not be adequate for this card? In my home computer I have a P6T6 Asus board and I was looking at the P6T7 for this, looking for more options.

Do we have to go I7 for a solution to this?

edit: As an alternative we are going to build 2 AMD based rigs with 2x 6990s each (unless 3 is possible?) and with more processing power (still 2 core Athlon but i assuem we would need more for going from 2x 6970 to 2x 6990)
 
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you might be better off with 2 5970s, they have more stream processors than 6990s
 
You might be able to use them with 16x--->1x adapter and having them separated by the adapter cable, i dont think that computing will require the bandwidth, alot like Bitcoin mining does not. also cooling will be your biggest concern. Power can be solved with having multiple power supplies feeding the cards.
 
I really don't think that Athlon is going to cut either. It still needd to supply those cards with information and Radeon cards EAT cpu cycles like its popcorn. I dunno why though. I would just get a 2500k if there is a mobo that will support that many cards.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
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FireBean said:
I really don't think that Athlon is going to cut either. It still needd to supply those cards with information and Radeon cards EAT cpu cycles like its popcorn. I dunno why though. I would just get a 2500k if there is a mobo that will support that many cards.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

Before working here I only ever built a couple of servers and mostly gaming computers but i'm behind the times with the high end stuff. What is a 2500k?

you might be better off with 2 5970s, they have more stream processors than 6990s
Click to expand...
You would think this being the case but we looked up benchmarks for software that uses this Streak SDK such as Bitcoin or folding and a 6990 is BY FAR the most superior card for this over the 5970. The 6970s had more power in those applications as well which is why we picked them for little boy.

You might be able to use them with 16x--->1x adapter and having them separated by the adapter cable, i dont think that computing will require the bandwidth, alot like Bitcoin mining does not. also cooling will be your biggest concern. Power can be solved with having multiple power supplies feeding the cards.
Click to expand...
Only problem is that i've never built a multi power supply system before but I could figure it out.

Saying you might be able to use them with a 16x--->1x adapter i'll have to confirm this if so we could just use the current computer we have already built.


Cooling shouldn't be a problem, we have a room we call "the freezer" for our servers and this would go in there.
 
Kanaric said:
Before working here I only ever built a couple of servers and mostly gaming computers but i'm behind the times with the high end stuff. What is a 2500k?


You would think this being the case but we looked up benchmarks for software that uses this Streak SDK such as Bitcoin or folding and a 6990 is BY FAR the most superior card for this over the 5970. The 6970s had more power in those applications as well which is why we picked them for little boy.


Only problem is that i've never built a multi power supply system before but I could figure it out.

Saying you might be able to use them with a 16x--->1x adapter i'll have to confirm this if so we could just use the current computer we have already built.


Cooling shouldn't be a problem, we have a room we call "the freezer" for our servers and this would go in there.
Click to expand...
not too surprised about the stream processors thing... they changed the architecture so you can't directly compare the numbers. the 6990 is definitely the more powerful card.

Dual PSU system wouldn't be a huge deal, you'd just need to put in some kind of relay to start the up at the same time.

The 16x->1x adaptor thing sounds a little sketchy. 8x slots should definitely be enough, but I'd worry about building a machine like this and then gimping it with limited bandwith. In the scheme of things the mobo price is a drop in the bucket compared to 4 6990's.

Still, I think I'd build 2x (2x6990) systems with less expensive mobos and probably bump the CPU's up to phenom quad cores or something at the very least.. Greatly reduced complexity. I guess you do have to worry that any 1 box would have less power than a 4xGPU monster would if you ever needed more
 
Activate: AMD said:
not too surprised about the stream processors thing... they changed the architecture so you can't directly compare the numbers. the 6990 is definitely the more powerful card.

Dual PSU system wouldn't be a huge deal, you'd just need to put in some kind of relay to start the up at the same time.

The 16x->1x adaptor thing sounds a little sketchy. 8x slots should definitely be enough, but I'd worry about building a machine like this and then gimping it with limited bandwith. In the scheme of things the mobo price is a drop in the bucket compared to 4 6990's.

Still, I think I'd build 2x (2x6990) systems with less expensive mobos and probably bump the CPU's up to phenom quad cores or something at the very least.. Greatly reduced complexity. I guess you do have to worry that any 1 box would have less power than a 4xGPU monster would if you ever needed more
Click to expand...

Yes we were pricing out what a 4x video cad rig would cost and since we can already source components like hard drives that we have laying around the 2x rigs would be more reasonable.

On the quad core when I started researching this people were running 2x 6990 or 4x 6950with a simple 3ghz dual core for Bitcoin at least but it is in our budget to build two of these with quad cores so I suppose we can do that. If we go under budget though they would be happy since we have some dual core processor computers of that kind for desktops that we could reuse the processor on. If it really is a difference though we will go quad. We want to get the most out of each system.
 
Intel Core i5 2500k. Overclock very close to 5Ghz without any real fancy cooling. It's beastly!
 
Easiest way to do Dual PSU's (Jumping is easier but this makes it more convenient than jumping it every time you start the machine.)

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/5...ower_Supply_Adapter_Cable.html?tl=g2c413s1220

I have one and it works perfectly

Also for a board if you went with a 2500K would be the ASUS P67 WS Revolution will run all GPUs at 8x (though it does not matter) and you can put 4 990s on it :D

good luck


EDIT: you gonna WC these beasts???
 
Kanaric said:
Before working here I only ever built a couple of servers and mostly gaming computers but i'm behind the times with the high end stuff. What is a 2500k?


You would think this being the case but we looked up benchmarks for software that uses this Streak SDK such as Bitcoin or folding and a 6990 is BY FAR the most superior card for this over the 5970. The 6970s had more power in those applications as well which is why we picked them for little boy.


Only problem is that i've never built a multi power supply system before but I could figure it out.

Saying you might be able to use them with a 16x--->1x adapter i'll have to confirm this if so we could just use the current computer we have already built.


Cooling shouldn't be a problem, we have a room we call "the freezer" for our servers and this would go in there.
Click to expand...

did say you looked at Bitcoin mining for comparison with this as well...? the 5970 destroys the 6970 in bitcoin mining with almost twice the amount of MH/s and the 6990 barely beats it, what charts were you looking at...? an "average" 6970 barely beats my OCed 5850...

:confused:
 
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wol-va-rine said:
did say you looked at Bitcoin mining for comparison with this as well...? the 5970 destroys the 6970 in bitcoin mining with almost twice the amount of MH/s and the 6990 barely beats it, what charts were you looking at...? an "average" 6970 barely beats my OCed 5850...

:confused:
Click to expand...

The 5xxx series is the bitcoin mining monster series, but note that he said the benchmarks specifically for their software suite including things outside of bitcoin mining where the 6990 is better than the 5970.
 
Screw that Bitcoin shit, the HD 6990 is a far more advanced GPU compared to the HD 5970, specially on GPGPU stuff.
 
For our application we did some tests with various speeds on PCI-E and found that with our current board that CAN do 3x 6990 16x (16x 8x 4x on our current setup) and it will at at damn near triple the rate that one card would run on. I dont have any hard numbers to post unfortunately since I can't post the results from these computers due to policy. Probably number crunching, like was said above, doesn't use the full bandwidth though i'd be wary with 1x 4x seems to be fine.

Using a 80 plus gold 1200w power supply we picked up at at a local mom and pop store and it seems to be good for this as well.

Everyone here seems to be happy with the 3x cards so thanks for the help.
 
Kanaric said:
I'm tasked with building a computer for ATI Stream based applications and was wondering if its possible to use 4x6990 in one computer and what minimum I would need for processor?

The application we are using only cares about the GPU, for example on our 2x6970 computer this will be the bigger brother of we have a 3ghz Athlon II x2 250. We are going to sell this to a coworker and try to build this monster.

My concerns are:
Fitting them into the same machine, which I believe I can do.
Finding a adequate power supply.
Findind an appropriate motherboard.

I assume a 4x PCI-E 2.0 board where 2 of the slots will be 8x would not be adequate for this card? In my home computer I have a P6T6 Asus board and I was looking at the P6T7 for this, looking for more options.

Do we have to go I7 for a solution to this?

edit: As an alternative we are going to build 2 AMD based rigs with 2x 6990s each (unless 3 is possible?) and with more processing power (still 2 core Athlon but i assuem we would need more for going from 2x 6970 to 2x 6990)
Click to expand...

you would definitely need to go with two systems like you plan to. windows vista/7 only support up to 8 display ports, each dual GPU card counts for 3 displays which is why its limited to quad crossfire/SLI. windows XP on the other hand supports up to 8 gpu's and an infinite amount of display ports. in folding, XP was the way to go since you could run 4 GTX 295's in a single system but those days are over with modern OS's. I'm not sure about linux and what it supports though. as far as the pci-e 2.0 slots go, 8x is more then enough bandwidth for data streaming. hell even 4x is enough. but for the amount of money being spent here i'd take a better processor, either the phenom II x6 1055T or 1090T. it will at least give you guys room to grow and leave extra headroom in case the programs change and require more CPU horsepower.


TehQuick said:
you might be better off with 2 5970s, they have more stream processors than 6990s
Click to expand...


depends on the application and how its coded for openCL/streaming.


FireBean said:
I really don't think that Athlon is going to cut either. It still needd to supply those cards with information and Radeon cards EAT cpu cycles like its popcorn. I dunno why though. I would just get a 2500k if there is a mobo that will support that many cards.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

depends on the application and how the application is coded. also depends on if the application's openCL/streaming support is multi-threaded. if its single threaded then yes the athlon II won't be enough, if its multi-threaded then its not as bad.
 
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FireBean said:
I really don't think that Athlon is going to cut either. It still needd to supply those cards with information and Radeon cards EAT cpu cycles like its popcorn. I dunno why though. I would just get a 2500k if there is a mobo that will support that many cards.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

Wrong, there's an article in Tom's Hardware and Xbit Labs that shows that the GTX 480 performs even worse than the HD 5870 when paired with weak processors.
 
I was raging so hard all over their forumz and internet, that I really think NV fixed that with 275 drivers

New benchies are needed.
 
wol-va-rine said:
did say you looked at Bitcoin mining for comparison with this as well...? the 5970 destroys the 6970 in bitcoin mining with almost twice the amount of MH/s and the 6990 barely beats it, what charts were you looking at...? an "average" 6970 barely beats my OCed 5850...
Click to expand...
Not quite, the 6990 beats them all, at least for bitcoin mining. The 5970 is a dual GPU card, you can't fairly compare it to the single GPU 6970 just because the model numbers look alike. It's basically the 6990 of the previous generation, with even more stream processors (3,200 vs 3,072) so yeah, it is still extremely competitive.

Lorien said:
At equal clocks 5970 >>> 6990
Click to expand...
Yeah but why would you keep them at equal clock when the most basic 6990 starts 100 MHz faster than a 5970. When overclocked at 900 MHz and more, it has more megahash power than the highest overclocked 5970. And the 5970 is no longer for sale anyway, you won't even find 4 used ones easily when you need to build a 4-cards rig.

sirmonkey1985 said:
you would definitely need to go with two systems like you plan to. windows vista/7 only support up to 8 display ports, each dual GPU card counts for 3 displays which is why its limited to quad crossfire/SLI.
Click to expand...
Display ports are probably irrelevant for a GPU application that may not use display at all, or just a few.
 
evolucion8 said:
Wrong, there's an article in Tom's Hardware and Xbit Labs that shows that the GTX 480 performs even worse than the HD 5870 when paired with weak processors.
Click to expand...
just because it uses less CPU cycles than a GPU that is not even being considered, doesn't mean it's a featherweight on CPU cycles for its software instruction compiler, either. :p
Chimel said:
Display ports are probably irrelevant for a GPU application that may not use display at all, or just a few.
Click to expand...

what sirmonkey1985 was refering to is a WDDM 1.1 limitation (Windows 7/S2008R2), where more than 5 GPUs would not be recognized. Windows XP and Vista were at 8 GPUs, iirc. I don't recall exactly why, however, it's a windows/directx platform limitation that's simply present, and must be accounted for if using Windows. Ask the [H] folding team's GPU farmers, they would be more knowledge about about this than I.
 
Thanks for the information, @jeremyshaw. I didn't see the need to answer the part about GPUs because @sirmonkey1985 said dual GPU cards are limited to quad crossfire on Windows 7 and Vista, so 8 GPUs too.
Besides, the OP did not even mention which OS he was using, the whole discussion about Windows is irrelevant if he is using Linux.
 
To run that many lanes you are going to need to, in fact, must go 1366 processor.

or

AM3+ and get a 8 core FX when they come out. AMD writes their drivers to be especially optimized for AMD Processors and Cards working together.

My recommendation!
 
Kanaric said:
possible to use 4x6990 in one computer and what minimum I would need for processor?
...

Do we have to go I7 for a solution to this?

edit: As an alternative we are going to build 2 AMD based rigs with 2x 6990s each (unless 3 is possible?) and with more processing power (still 2 core Athlon but i assuem we would need more for going from 2x 6970 to 2x 6990)
Click to expand...
You may want to reference the article below. Although it's built with nvidia cards, much if it should apply to what you're making. It may help you make better choices if the purpose is close to the same.

High-performance computing on gamer PCs
 
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