Upgraded GForce 210 to GForce 440 on the desktop computer, cost £40, had to buy 2nd hand because of potential compatibility issues with the PCI-E 3.0 cards in the shops, still using nForce4 chipset on the desktop computer, so 2nd hand was the best option. Fortunately there was a Fermi card available in the 2nd hand hardware store.

I am actually quite out of date in video card programming terms, the old 210 had limited functionality. Another downside to using the old computer is the lack of UVA (unified virtual memory access), I really think that would be interesting. The reason I can't use it is that UVA needs a 64 bit operating system, so even if it is convenient on the nForce4 it is currently impossible since I am running XP. I am considering investigating UVA on linux however.

The software model I am interested in has UVA with the database in virtual memory, however the VM will need to be loaded in megabyte chunks because you need to free up VM sometimes, this is fine because you can simple have an index file open all the time, then you read from your index file to access blocks stored in the "Tiled" virtual memory files, then after a block has been accessed, it is either kept open for future use or removed from use.

There is a lot of low level coding involved with this project.

And its my birthday.