A research group at the University of Antwerp has developed a PC consisting of gaming hardware (NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2) . It uses 4 dual GPU graphics cards, each consisting of 128 subprocessors and the total setup costs about 4000 Euros. It uses Nvidia’s CUDA technology to perform computations in parallel (this is the key to exploiting the maximum mileage out of the system). This machine is called FASTRA, and can deliver the same performance as a supercomputer consisting of hundreds of PCs. The group does research on computational tomography which is extremely computation intensive. Its a nice breakthrough and would hopefully be useful for research labs short on cash. Here is a video from the group detailing the FASTRA