Archives Discussions

[trycage]

Software and Hardware support

Hi All

We ended up in choosing the 5970 against the latest firestream for its better performance/money ratio. I would like to build a workstation for scientific purposes with 4 card HD 5970 in crossire configuration under Fedora core 12 64bit  and I have some problem to solve in both  hardware and software sides. I hope I will find a the right answer here.

Software

does the most recent linux (64bit) driver spport 8 gpu's?

is there any architecture constrain? (e.g.  max addressable GDDR5 ram, intel vs AMD mobo chipset)

Hardware:

The HD 5970 occupies 2 slot in thickness, hence It would require a motherboard with 4 pci-e 16X double spaced. I'm looking for both a solution with socket 775 and the new socket 1156.

I have the feeling that it is going that the case is going to be very hot, any suggestion?

Fast estimation tells me a need at least 1000W power supply, any suggestion about it?

I know that due to the number of questions this message can be a little off topic, I hope you don't mind if I post it here

Thanks for any help you can provide me

MArco

[Starglider]

We ended up in choosing the 5970 against the latest firestream for its better performance/money ratio.

I would like to do that too, but unfortunately it won't work. As of Stream 2.2 the second GPU on the 5970 is not supported. The problem seems to be that it is locked into crossfire mode and cannot be used for compute.

I would like to build a workstation for scientific purposes with 4 card HD 5970 in crossire configuration under Fedora core 12 64bit

Crossfire prevents use of more than the first GPU for compute; you always want to disable Crossfire for compute applications. Crossfire configurations of more than four GPUs are not supported anyway. Unfortunately as noted above it seems impossible to disable Crossfire on the 5970.

is there any architecture constrain? (e.g.  max addressable GDDR5 ram, intel vs AMD mobo chipset)

The main problem is BIOS support. For example the BIOS on my EVGA SR-2 motherboard is only certified to support 7 GPUs.

I have the feeling that it is going that the case is going to be very hot, any suggestion?

Use water cooling.

Fast estimation tells me a need at least 1000W power supply, any suggestion about it?

The Radeon 5970 has a max power consumption of 300W, that's 1200W for four plus the power for your motherboard and CPU. I would use two 800W power supplies with a dual PSU adapter cable... but as I said, this setup will not work at all unless and until AMD fix the 5970 useless second GPU bug.

[Promilus]

CFX disabling on X2 cards used to require Catalyst AI OFF

Don't know if it remained that way.