£2000 for physics simulations

[wjh31]

a friend of mine needs a new rig for the sole purpose of running physics simulations for his Ph.D, and asked me to look into what can be gotten for a self build while he looks for ready made systems, i was thinking along the lines of :

Q9650

4x2GB DDR2 1066MHz

Asus Maxiumus II Formula P45

2x HD4870x2

OCZ 128GB SSD + 640GB Barracuda 7200.11

but then i saw the AEIGA PhysX and thought maybe a pair of them would be better than some regular graphics cards since it's physics simulations he's after, so i thought id ask you lot for your input, any appreciated, thanks.

[flanzig1]

I would guess that the software that will do the simulations are going to be more CPU intensive than GPU.
That would be a thing to find out before commting a bunch of money for Physx cards. As for the Physx cards, they came out to improve the performance of older video cards. Today's cards will out run any of the older cards with Physx cards.

[wjh31]

he said he wanted programmable graphics card(s) as the gpu's are capable of much more than than a cpu if you can write the software to take advantage of them, F@H i believe to be an example, however im not sure if a graphics card needs to be specialist to be programmable or whatever, he's not much of a hardware geek so isnt too sure himself i think, this is where i was hoping some of you might be able to help

the alternative i though of was to maybe get a multi cpu server MB, would that be reasonable?