[g__day (Matthew)]

Well the latest workstation news is I wanted to up its CUDA capabilities - for PI Xterminators, for SetiAstro Suite denoise and sharpen and Davinci Resolve encoding. So after a lot of research about power and cabling I decided to step away from 2nd hand cards like the P6000 and go with a ASUS ProAft Geforce RTX 4070 - the 8 pin power connector version (using dual female 6 pin PCIE to single male 8 pin adapter).

So the GPU will be available on Monday and hopefully the required power cable will arrive next week so I can put it all together. I am still trying to work out if it will / should have a bracket to help support the weight - the way the P4000 currently does.

This approach will up the number of CUDA cores from 1,792 to 5,888. Now from a gaming perspective - one wants to keep a CPU speed to GPU speed balanced - and one would be generally looking for a 4-5 GHz CPU to pair with a 4070 or faster card - but for compute processing a ton of 2.8 GHz cores trying to keep a 4070 busy will be interesting to observe; and I guess it could still play games - though that is not its key purpose.

The 4070 was the most modern card I wished to go to - not a Super or Ti version or a 4080 or 4090 or wait a few months for the 5000 series - becuase of power and unknowns about the 5000 series. All the larger 4xxx cards need more than a single 8 PCIE power cable to get a 12 or 16 pin cable - and I didn't want to get crazy wiring to get two 8 pin cables by gluing 6 pin PCIE and 2 x SATA power cables to try and clear that hurdle.

So hopefully in the next few days I can report how it all goes down!