Mid-low end nVidia for physx\folding?

Seeing as I now have a motherboard with 2 PCI-E slots, I was thinking of getting a mid-low end nVida card to run along side my 4850 to handle any physx duties, and as a bonus get me in on some of those nice meaty F@H ppd rewards nVidia users seem to get.

Thing is I am clueless as to what cards the green team have out that will fit my purpose, was thinking along the lines of a second hand 9600, or 8800GS, but am not sure what the power consumption of these cards would be like or if a new lower end xxxGT or whatever they are called these days, would provide the same performance but lower noise and power usage because as a secondary card I wouldn't want to be paying loads extra on my electric bill.

Also a quick question about the drivers, I assume they will live happily with each other, many moons ago I had a 7500 PCI and a Geforce 4 running together, because at that time I needed 3 monitors, and I remember a couple of times getting into fierce fights with the drivers after updating them trying to get them to work the way I expected.

8800GS (aka 9600GSO 96 shader version!) would be best for folding - the extra shaders are what counts. On the same basis I'd've thought a GT240 would be the best option from the newer cards: 512MB DDR3 version ~ £52 (memory size & bandwidth don't seem to impact folding too much).

But unless you're planning on using hacked drivers you won't be able to benefit from PhysX in games if your primary graphics card is an ATI...

No, unfortunately nvidia didn't like that fact that you could use a low end card to do pshyx and an ati to be the primary card, so currently the dirvers will dissable physx if another card is detected.

There are some hacked drivers about also some of the beta drivers allow it.

for a card I'd sugest a 9800gt "eco version" these are ones using the dieshrunk g92b and do not require an additional pci-e lead.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/222567 £67 only gddr2 however that shouldn't effect folding or physx as they are more dependent on the number of cores AFAIK

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Originally Posted by Pob255

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/222567 £67 only gddr2 however that shouldn't effect folding or physx ...

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That's a very good call - looks like a perfect folding card to me... :)

The Inno3d looks good, will have a poke about to see if I can get it cheaper was looking to spend about £50, and it is a bit of a blow that nVidia have changed the drivers, surely that falls under some EU anti-competition laws?

Edit: ha, I just realised the last time I mixed it up like this was with an inno3d geforce and a sapphire radeon, what are the chances I would be considering the same option years down the line.

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Originally Posted by Golden Dragoon

... it is a bit of a blow that nVidia have changed the drivers, surely that falls under some EU anti-competition laws? ...

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Probably not - or at least not in a way that could be made to stick. They blame it on not being able to QA PhysX in systems with ATI graphics cards. Funny how they only disable it for ATI graphics cards and not the hundreds of different chipsets, sound cards, hard drive controllers and other bits of odd hardware that they presumably also haven't been able to QA, though... ;)

If they were called Intel or Microsoft it probably would do

As they own the underlaying software/technology, but they don't block other other forms of software that does simular things like dx11 direct compute, OpenCL or ati stream

MS and intel tend to get anti-turst by doing things that block compeating software from working, basically they are doing enough to just stay inside the law.

I'm still suprised that intel haven't copped it for what they've done to their new chipset designs and the lisence fees they are charging, which has basically made it impossible for anyone else to develope chipsets for the i range cpu's and still be competitive.

if the 9800gt is too much money then a 2nd hand 8800gs or 9600gso is your best bet if you can find one cheap.
there's a few of auctions on fleabay under £20 atm and a buy-it-now on a 8800gs for £25 (although it sounds like the fan bareing is going)

Ok lets speculate and put it in this hypothetical way:
I need a 3 monitor setup again, so I buy the cheapest graphics card that supports 3 monitors, say a HD5400 or something (don't know if they do, but whatever), then later I decide I want to play games on my new hdtv, and the other graphics card hasn't got component out due to having 3 monitor outputs. So I start looking about, and hear about this thing called physx and I think to myself "that sounds cool, I need that above everything else" so I go out and buy a new GT260 or something, I rush home all excited reading the physx feature blurb on the box, I pop it in and I get massively disappointed that nVidia say that I shalt not have my physx while an ati card dwells within my system, I must buy another of their products to get features that have been payed for.
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In my view that is a classic anti-competition move, the hypothetical me there would now have to go out and buy another nvidia graphics card to enjoy a feature that is part of the specifications of the graphics card, and has been payed for in full by me all ready, also in the future were I to require a new graphics card, I am locked into buying nvidia products because of this.
I wonder if anyone has tried getting physx with a matrox, s3 or any other brand of graphics card, is it just aimed against ati, or is it a blanket ban on other display adapters?

Think about it this way, if they disabled the ability to accelerate 3d graphics, simply because you had another card in the system as well then there would be a massive uproar of angry people, this is effectively the same thing the main difference is that a lot of people are indifferent about physx.

I would like to point out btw that physx isn't a big deal to me, I just hate it when companies do things like this.

Not quite, physX is just one Physics engine and a proprietary one owned by nvidia, they do not stop other physics engines being used, if it did block any other physics engine then that would be uncompetative and nvidia would be neck deep in law suits.
(your example of disableing 3d acceleration, would effect all 3d engines.)

nvidia have gone this route to reduce the cost for developers, unlike intel's Havok, which is run on the cpu and can be run by ether intel or amd cpu's however developers have to pay a lisence fee to use it in a game.
And PhysX can still be run at a basic level on the cpu.

Like I said they are just doing enough to keep legal, I don't agree with the way they've done it but I do understand the reasons for it.

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Originally Posted by Pob255

As they own the underlaying software/technology, but they don't block other other forms of software that does simular things like dx11 direct compute, OpenCL or ati stream

MS and intel tend to get anti-turst by doing things that block compeating software from working, basically they are doing enough to just stay inside the law.

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Not really - MS got done simply for providing easy access to their own browser, there was no problem running other browsers, MS were just adjudged to be using the market share unfairly. nVidia are similarly using their market share, but they are also blocking use of a competitors product (albeit by cutting their own noses off). If they were in a dominant market position I think they would be slapped by the EU, but they're not in the same way that MS are. Kudos to AMD for not retaliating though - it'd be easy for them to just say 'AMD cards only in AMD machines please or we'll run the CPU at 1% performance levels'.. but they'd risk a reaction from Intel I'd guess, and their graphics division can't afford to lose that market.

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I'm still suprised that intel haven't copped it for what they've done to their new chipset designs and the lisence fees they are charging, which has basically made it impossible for anyone else to develope chipsets for the i range cpu's and still be competitive.

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You mean their patents? I'm pretty sure they can point to the billions spent in R&D and indicate good reason for wanting to maintain a patent.

I bought that 8800gs on ebay, thanks for pointing that out Pob255, looks like it uses the same heatsink as the 6800's did back in the day and I have a quadro with one of them, no idea if it works but I can swap the fans over quickly enough.

I'm still not entirely sure you understand what I was trying to say though, yes physx is nvidia's property, yes it works in a somewhat reduced mode on your cpu, but it is touted as a feature their graphics cards are capable of accelerating, that is the point I am making, it is a feature that is perfectly capable of co-existing with anything else in your pc, but they disable it if you happen to have another card that they haven't made.
Sony are facing class action lawsuits for disabling a feature of the PS3 via an update, this is a very similar situation and nvidia would be facing law suits were it not for the fact it it is very easy to remove the restriction as it is only driver level.

As Columbo may have said once, just one more thing... a quote from nvidia themselves

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PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it.

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Where did that quote come from? because it's not, it's limited free distribution, which means you can freely download and istalll it, you can develope software that uses it, hardware that uses it would have to be lisenced and nvidia are probably doing the same as intel and setting the lisence fee so high that it would be impossible for any other company to produce a card with that lisence and still be competative.

Motherboards are a good example here, while the chipsets and pci-e controllers in the core i systems can run sli not all motherboard do, why? because to do it they need a lisence from nvidia so the motherboard manufactures have not lisenced some cheap boards to keep the costs down

@Kalniel, it wasn't just that, what sparked it off was some windows updates that reset your default browser back to IE and locked certain registry settings so communication went via IE which means it's impossible to remove or not use IE. (this was back on win98)
Having to reset you default browser ever couple of weeks was a right pain.

Yes that's what I mean about patents, but it's not to do with development costs alone, the lisencing charges they have put on a 3rd party developing a chipset to work with the new core i system would add around 50-66% to the cost of both developing a chipset and manufactoring it.
Which means that while it is possible for a 3rd party to develope and produce a rival chipset, it is not really economically possible.

I'm betting this is just what nvidia has done with physX, they've set a very high lisence cost, if ati was willing to pay it then we'd see the restriction droped altogether, however the costs of ati cards would go up so much that noone would be willing to buy them.

Not a very nice parctise but legal, don't think this will be the last we see of such things, the pc industry is moving, it's the lisenceing to 3rd parties where the profit is really made.

It is the first sentence of the statement they released when they disabled physx when using another company's graphics cards, this it the full statement:

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Physx is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs.

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Interesting ruling from FTC in their anti-trust case against Intel:
http://www.dailytech.com/FTC+Intel+R...ticle19265.htm

Specifically the section about not being able to use the compiler to gain an advantage by generating inferior code not using a competitors features. Now look at PhysX which appears to deliberately hamstring CPU calculations by not using SSE and instead forcing use of x87 instructions... could be very interesting.