Hi there
So today I bought a second hand dell 3600 xeon quad core 3.6ghz with 32 gig ram , unfortunately it only has a quadro 600 graphics card in it.
It's running windows 7 professional 64 bit.
Old I know but solidly built and at least half the price of buying something new with those specs.

I've migrated from a variety of mac products none of which were particularly good at running Houdini.

My question is which graphics card should i be looking at to reduce my processing time for fluid simulations.

Looking at the sidefx recommended specs for graphics cards it seems to say I could only use (within my price range) geforce 400 or 500 series cards as they support opencl.
Does this mean later cards don't support opencl and won't make any impact on sim processing time?

What would I gain from buying other cards which are listed as being supported?

If I replace the quadro 600 my main aim would be to reduce the processing time for simulations.

Any advice much appreciated.
thanks nigel.

The trend seems to be the nVidia 960 or better. But quite frankly don't expect any amazing speed out of GPU accelerated sims. You can expect maybe a 30% increase in speed.

I find having a faster CPU gives more benefit than a GPU. If you are comfortable with overclocking and the motherboard supports it you may want to try to push the CPU up to at least 4.0Ghz.

If your new system does not have a SSD drive, I would recommend that.

Cool, thanks.
Yeah, I think I'll give the 960 a go, price is reasonable. And an ssd.
So the ssd will come in to play in terms of read/write speed of caches?

re overclocking will look into that but even a 30% decrease in sim calc time via gpu would be good.

Yeah my system does not have SSD drive. Can I push my CPU to 4.0Ghz? :roll:

The problem with Dells and HPs and all those prosumer products are that their motherboards are built to a certain spec and not as flexible as after market motherboard products. You may not be able to overclock using the default motherboard. Check out the system specs and poke around in the BIOS if you are interested. Xeons are good workhorse processors though.

The SSD just smooths out the system overall. When I use systems with mechanical drives I can actually feel the lag when performing tasks.

Yeah true about the inflexibilty of the board no overclocking there, which is a shame given the size of the heatsink.

Installing the gtx960 4gig made a big difference to simulation times, i'd say more than a 30% decrease so well worth it.
I take that back, see new post

Now I just need to get the ssd installed, easier said than done as it shows in bios but not the os.