ATI Gflops (in works)

[DrPop]

I gotcha. Understood. Well, for DiRT you probably want an nVidia card then, because the newer AMD/ATI cards are going to be expensive, and the older ones don't do well there.
See what you can cobble together, and then if you need something cheap but w/ decent DiRT credits, look for a GTX 460, 470 (it will put out serious heat, but really good credits as well) and GTX 560 Ti, 560 Ti 448 core, or GTX 570. That is in order of cheapest (least credits) to most expensive (best credits).

Hope that helps a little and let us know what you find to use! Someone on the team may have an older nVidia GPU to sell you for a good deal too - never know, it happens from time to time when someone wants to upgrade.

[krazy k]

That's probably where I'm going. Craigslist has a bunch of cards, but I guess I was just looking for the best price point.

No matter how old the card is someone still wants $50. (8800GTS) And then there's a handful of 460s at $75.

I looked in the for sale and couldn't find anything there, so I'll just have to keep my eyes open.

[DrPop]

OK, well we'll all put our heads together and find you something. I wouldn't got any lower than a GTX 460, and preferably a 465 or 470; if you go as low as the 400 series - this is for high output on DiRT crunching I mean. The 500 series is best, but that is certainly going to be more costly and we're looking for inexpensive here...

On the ATI side of things, you could get by with a 5870 or so, but the problem is they weren't really good at DiRT output until the 7900 series. It has to do with the architectural changes to the GPU style, and how it uses GPU compute commands.
Keep us in the loop on what you find!

[Dandasarge]

updated

[FourOh]

I keep looking at the R9 Fury Nano - on paper it should be a huge cruncher. About 3 times as many GFLOPS per Watt as 7970 or 280X, more efficient than GTX 970 or 980... someone needs to try one out!

[Dandasarge]

I was looking at them today. 600 isn't the worst price in the world but I have a 970 in the "micro" size and the cooler on it sucks. I'm sure the Nano will have heat issues.

[FourOh]

I was looking at them today. 600 isn't the worst price in the world but I have a 970 in the "micro" size and the cooler on it sucks. I'm sure the Nano will have heat issues.

That's my concern... it's set up for gaming or 4k HTPC usage, not 24/7 crunching.

AMD today dropped the price on Nano to $500 to put it in more direct competition with the GTX 980: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9938/a...r9-nano-to-499

[Mumps]

Meh. If you really want to crunch on *anything* 24/7, you need to go for the third-party after-market Water-cooling solutions... Oh.. Wait... Never mind..

[FourOh]

Meh. If you really want to crunch on *anything* 24/7, you need to go for the third-party after-market Water-cooling solutions... Oh.. Wait... Never mind..

Too soon, Mumps!

[Dandasarge]

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