Quote from mcgene4xpro:
My budget for this project is under 3000$.
This is the challenge.
Realistically, that kind of money will only get you a decent workstation with two GTX590's.
Here's a public wish list on NewEgg that, for $3K (excluding taxes and shipping) will give you (NewEgg currently limits the GTX590 to 1 per customer, so you need to order a second one at an additional $750):
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=17928906
2 GTX390's, these are dual-GPU cards with 1.5GB per GPU. For $150 less per card you could go with an MSI GTX580 that comes with a single GPU but has 3GB.
An i7-2600K and Asus P8P67 WS motherboard. What's nice about this board is it comes with an NF200, which will give you a full 16x per video card.
8 GB of DDR3-1866 CAS 9 RAM.
2 60GB SSDs, for a 120GB RAID0 system drive.
2 750GB SATAIII hard disks for a 1.5GB RAID0 data drive.
An Enermax 1350w P/S since the two GTX590s will consume about 700w at load.
A DVD RW, Noctua heatsink and Cooler Master Nvida mid-tower.
The i7-2600K can overclock to 4.5GHz without breaking a sweat. At that speed it's comparable in performance to a $1k i7-990x for a lot of computing tasks. Tom's hardware did a decent comparison a few months back.
All told, this is a pretty damned nice CUDA workstation and almost exactly what I'll be ordering myself in the next week or two.
