Just a quick report. Today I installed a 2Gig GTX460 in my i7 3.2Ghz 960. I kept the GeForce 9400 I had in there for the display, and configured the system to use only the 460 for OpenCL. The 9400 doesn’t seem to do much for RT/GPU and the display/interface does not slow down with this configuration.
The board takes up two slots, but the 460 is not a full-sized board length-wise, so it fits quite well. I’m running here with an Intel DX580SO motherboard which has two PCIe 2.0 x 16 slots, thus the ability to get both boards in.
After upgrading drivers, everything seems to work perfectly. In Rt/GPU, I’m getting just under a 4x rendering speed increase over RT/CPU with the i7, which moves along pretty good on its own. I haven’t tried mixing them yet - I’ll mess with that tomorrow.
With tax and shipping, this board is costing me ~259$ after a mail-in rebate, so it seems to be a pretty good deal when you consider the 2gig RAM on board. As you might imagine, I’m seriously considering getting another 460 which would bring my GPU rendering speed increase to nearly 8x over the CPU - all that for a ~520$ - not too bad.
I hope this might help anyone out there considering this board.
No, it just physically takes up two slots and uses a single PCIe connection. I believe that most motherboards that have two PCIe slots have them seperated by at least two slots (if not more for cooling purposes), so you can mount multiple boards. It’s certainly something to look for when getting ready to buy a new machine or motherboard.
hi i have got my two 460 card now. i put them in to different machines und let them render in distributed mode. one pc is running under win 7 x64 the other with xp x64. with win7 i have very poor viewport performance in wireframe mode. worse than the 285 performance… i installed the latest beta driver 260.63 today. the frame buffer/active shade window remains black! with the 258.96 it is working…
