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Author Topic: Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?  (Read 2411 times)

Super_Saffer

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Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?
« on: September 12, 2021, 05:39:34 PM »
As you all know GPU prices are insane right now, and I'm looking for a cost effective way to beef up an older second system to use for jobs.  I see that the Nvidia Tesla K80 has some pretty good specs, and is really cheap online because of the lack of monitor output. 

What would the K80 be comparable to? I have a 2070 Super in my main system. Doesn't anyone have any experience with this card? Possibly in a 2x or 3x configuration.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2021, 05:42:02 PM by Super_Saffer »

Bzuco

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Re: Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2021, 08:16:41 PM »
According number of cuda cores, core frequency, boost frequency and total GFlops power you can expect performance ~exactly to your 2070super.
It is questionable, if CUDA 3.7 compute ability is enough for metashape.
With OpenCL 3.0 should be no problem.
It is a little bit power hungry...300W
« Last Edit: September 12, 2021, 08:22:04 PM by Bzuco »

wojtek

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Re: Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2021, 08:22:24 PM »
I dunno if investing in a Kepler based card makes sense. You'd need to do/find some benchmarks as it may be slower than some lower end modern cards (it is an 8 year old architecture at this point after all)

edit: Over here these cards are around the same price as used 1080ti which does not make them look all that good.

BetaTest

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Re: Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?
« Reply #3 on: October 01, 2021, 10:13:21 AM »
There was another post (some time ago) inquiring about another NVIDIA Tesla card, possibly the K40.  The consensus was that despite the age, it does benchmark similar to modern cards, despite the high power consumption.

Keep in mind; however, that due to the power-consumption, it's easy to heat-up which results in *throttling* down the GPU.  Therefore, in consideration for the high power consumption, you must be sure you add supplemental cooling.  Either on the card itself or adding some high-power on-demand ancillary cooling.

Keep in mind the K80 also has 2x 12GB RAM (it's essentially designed as a 2x GPU on a card).  Because GPU memory is so crucial to Metashape, you should notice that for the price, you'll get great bang-for-your-buck with the K80, providing you don't mind compensating for the power/heat issue.

If you do go with a K80, will you report back and share your real-world experience?  Thank you!

Error401

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Re: Nvidia Tesla K80. A good, cheap option?
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2021, 10:48:48 PM »
I'm running 2x K80's in a Dell R720 server chassis and have no gripes. 

The biggest problem you'll have with the Teslas is cooling, as it does not have a fan (they're made for servers).

The other thing is that each physical K80 shows up as 2 distinct GPUs.