VGA card(GPU) for Microsoft Cognitive CNTK/TensorFlow

Question

Where can I purchase good VGA card(GPU) for Microsoft Cognitive CNTK/TensorFlow programming? can you suggest commonly used GPU model with affordable price?

Answer 1

For tensorflow programming you can find a list of CUDA compatible graphics cards here and choose whichever fits your needs best but know if you want to use the Tensorflow-gpu pre-built binaries you need a card with CUDA Compatability of 3.5 or higher(at least on windows).

If you want to run tensorflow on windows 10 with a graphics card of CUDA capability of 3.0 you could look at this, you would build from source with some edits to the CMakeList here This would allow you to find a card with 3.0 compatibility.

Although as a fair warning on building your own tensorflow binary "don't build a TensorFlow binary yourself unless you are very comfortable building complex packages from source and dealing with the inevitable aftermath should things not go exactly as documented." from here

Answer 2

You need a CUDA-compatible graphics card with Compute Capability (CC) 3.0 or more to use CNTK GPU capabilities.

You can find CUDA-compatible graphics cards here and here (for older cards)

You can also use Microsoft Azure’s specialized Deep Learning Virtual Machine if you’re considering the cloud as an option.