Since yesterday was my B-Day, I decided that even in these harsh economical times I’d award myself a little gift. Nothing too expensive, and bought from a good friend.

Since a couple of days I am the proud owner of a brand new (never used) Nvidia 9800GX2 video card and Foxconn BlackOps motherboard.

To tell you the truth, I’ve lately become more an ATI than Nvidia fan, but I could not, obviuosly, loose the chance to buy these components at more than a fair price. And since they are brand new, well… they are just what I’ve been looking for!

Since I am missing some components at the moment, like CPU and RAM, it’ll take some time before I can finally see the pc start. But I hope it wont take that long. I’ll install a second video card to deliver the PhysX calculations on a separate, dedicated GPU, so I’ll count in total 3 GPU inside the system. I am still choosing between a 8800GTS 640MB and a 8800GTX/Ultra video card for this.

For those of you who are wondering how will I manage to power up this small computing beast, I’ll use an ANTEC QUATTRO 1000W power supply.

I even have a nice idea of adding a third card, putting the GPU count up to four in total. The motherboard supports 3 PCIe video cards, so why not use them all? For this, I’ll see if I still can use my old and trusty ASUS x1600PRO. Still works fine, but not sure wether mixing ATI and NVIDIA is a good choice, driver wise. I’ll try it out and come back with my experiences here on my blog.

Well, as you can see, I am going for GPU computing bonanza here! Wish me luck, since this GPU computing beast will take time to assemble. Ah, one last thing: I forgot to say the reason for all this: no, it’s not to be able to play, finally, Crysis with all details set to high… My goal is to build a “cheapo” graphical workstation. With gaming components. Of course I’ll do also some crunching…

BTW: don’t worry for the cooling: liquid is the only way I can think of to manage the heat output of all the video cards. Details of the liquid cooling loop in future articles, as the PC comes slowly to life.

Stay tuned…