Re: [ANN] cudaMiner - a new litecoin mining application [Windows/Linux]
I can get 4 motherboards for that
What's the point then?
Who buys these things???
I'm paying about $190 for the sku that allows me to directly connect 4 GPUs and use an ATX PSU to power the adapter boards.
My math says that for $450 + cost of GPUs, I can get 6 cards running just by running 6 cards per system with x1 risers.
My math says that for $820 + cost of GPUs, I can get 12 cards running on one system by using two of the x4 splitters with a single system.
Tells me I'm saving $80 per 12 GPU's I want to scale.
Probably close enough to not matter, but I just think it's cool to get 12 cards working on one system. Plus, the supplier said that volume discounts are applicable.
To be honest...I could probably design a clone of their host and adapter boards pretty easily...I wouldn't have a problem having PLX sending me their silicon. If I was serious about mining, that's probably what I'd do. If I didn't have a nice office job, it's probably something that would be fun to try. It's just an over-glorified high speed inter-poser board. I'm sure PLX has a reference design that takes the guesswork out of the schematic and layout. It may be interesting to do a BOM scrub of the host/adapter boards, contact the suppliers, and see how much it costs in materials. If only I had the time.
If you were semi-serious about GPU mining and wanted to fill a small warehouse, designing your own PCIe extender assembly with PLX silicon would probably be a good move given then triviality of designing the host/adapter boards. Christian, that other x1 splitter you're linking to splits the bandwidth of a single x1 PCIe link between four cards. Given that cudaminer chokes an x1 slot with one card already, splitting that four ways sounds like a horrible idea. From what I can tell running one instance of cudaminer for a 750 Ti with 5x24 config uses about 68% of a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface bandwidth. Of course, if you find a way to severely reduce the BW required by Cudaminer, then yes, that cheaper splitter could work just fine.
The PLX based splitter that I linked two is actually an x4 to four x1 bridge. Big difference.
I'm doing all of this more just for fun than to try and make a buck. I consider all money spent on anything related to mining basically lost.
Does this trick windows into thinking there is only 1 gpu or will it read 4 gpus?
Only reason asking I can see having 2 of these for a total of 8 750ti's. Plus keeping 1 main card in my rig to run my 3 monitors and still mine like I am currently doing. That is of course if Windows 7 would read 3 cards total or 9 cards total. I know Windows 7 Won't run 9 cards.
Windows will see a PLX PCIe bridge and then see the four cards connected to that bridge. We'll find out soon how the operating systems affect the qty of cards to have drivers loaded. I'm too lazy to try and look it up because there are too many people that are on these forums that are full of crap when they cite limitations of this or that. The extender is in the mail and I've got 9 cards at my disposal so we shall see.
I assume I'll run into a BIOS issue before anything else. Likely run out of BIOS PCIe address space. I'm not too familiar with this stuff.