DATA SCIENCE

An Affordable GPU for Data Scientists

What you need to know about affordable GPUs in the market for your next data science project.

If you are a data scientist and looking for an affordable GPU for your PC, this article is for you. When you have a tight budget, you must be more informed to find the best option for your money. If you don’t have a limited budget, still you can learn many technical aspects from this article and make a more informed purchase.

If you were a gamer, you basically had two choices for your graphic cards: AMD graphic cards or NVIDIA graphic cards. But, since you are a data scientist, and maybe a gamer, you have only one choice: NVIDIA. Why can’t you pick AMD? Because you need CUDA as an important component in your Data Science PC. You can think of CUDA as a computer programming language that allows you and many other available libraries (such as amazing Tensorflow or PyTorch) to do parallel computation on NVIDIA GPUs. CUDA is developed by NVIDIA and only available on NVIDIA GPUs. Until AMD builds something as popular as CUDA, data scientists are glued to NVIDIA GPUs.

Now, the next question is what type of NVIDIA graphic card should I buy? Although choosing between AMD and NVIDIA was straightforward, but choosing the right graphic card…