F@H Rigs

Could you guys please take a look at this and let me know if you would change anything?

These components will go to make 2 rigs for the Folding@Home project. They need to be cheap but fast enough to make it worthwhile running them.

I have chosen the 920s because they will get QMD Work Units (WUs) (2 at a time) which are quite profitable pointswise (AMD rigs don't get these WUs).

The DVD/RW will be used to set the machines up and then used in one of my other rigs.

I have chosen the P5LD2-VMs because they have onboard graphics (graphics will be pretty much redundant).

I was going to run them nekkid but the Optronix cases are cheaper to buy than a PSU on it's own

The obvious question - can anyone suggest any changes which would save me money or cut down on noise (these will be running in my bedroom along with 2 existing rigs and I will be adding more as funds become available - I also have my best 2 rigs in the living room)?

Can anyone suggest a decent, quiet cooler for these (bearing in mind they are Micro ATX boards)? I will probably want to overclock them modestly to squeeze a little more out of them but I don't intend going mad.

CD-036-PO Pioneer DVR-110BK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM (CD-036-PO) 1
£25.95 £25.95
CP-111-IN Intel Pentium 4 920 Dual Core "LGA775 Presler" 2.8GHz (800FSB) - Retail (CP-111-IN) 2
£154.95 £309.90
MB-110-AS Asus P5LD2-VM Intel 945G Micro ATX (LGA775) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-110-AS) 2
£69.95 £139.90
MY-059-CS Corsair 1GB DDR2 XMS2-5400 TwinX (2x512MB) (MY-059-CS) 2
£64.95 £129.90
OS-001-MS Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition inc. SP2 - OEM (OS-001-MS) 2
£50.95 £101.90
HD-025-SA Samsung SpinPoint P HD040GJ 40GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-025-SA) 2
£29.95 £59.90
CA-002-OP Optronix Midi Tower Case - (Silver) 400w PSU (CA-002-OP) 2
£22.50 £45.00
Subtotal £812.45
VAT £142.18
Total £954.63

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Thanks.

Stan

tbh, apart from the QMDs, your gonna get better performace per £ with AMDs

also the PSUs that come with cases tend to suckass

Maybe linux instead of windows
Find some cheap HDD on ForSale Forum

QMDs are gone and may not come back. Also, when the 600 pointers were around, my Opty146 was crunching them in 38 hours giving a much higher PPD than a P4-2400 doing the 450pt QMDs in 54 hours. An overclocked AMD San Diego is still going to give the best PPD.

QMDs're definitely coming back, nobody's ever said otherwise. I think the spec looks pretty good, Stan. The PSU is probably pretty crap but I think you can deal with it. Maybe if one pops down the line you can just replace it with a better one and split it between a few machines.

As for the noise, I'm not sure you can escape it. Perhaps you can noise insulate the cases but you're not going to be able to completely squelch the din of 4 P4 2.8 cores. Maybe try liquid immersion cooling? You could probably fit 4 micro ATX mobos in a decent sized fishtank from a thrift store. Then it'd be real quiet.

/just an idea.

For a folding rig i'd get the cheapest of nearly everything - cheapest mobo for sure with everything you need onboard.

Case doesn't matter, PSU might be worth some consideration but without a power hungry GPU you'll probably be OK.

Generic DDR2 if cheaper.

VeNT said:

tbh, apart from the QMDs, your gonna get better performace per £ with AMDs

also the PSUs that come with cases tend to suckass

Click to expand...

Whilst the double Gromacs are around I would agree with you (and MikeTimbers) but when there were only piddly WUs on the go my San Diego was on less than 200PPD whilst my P4 2.4 @2640 was hitting nearly 250PPD on QMDs.

I will be in Egypt for another 3 weeks yet so will be keeping my eye on the QMD situation and if the new ones are released before then and are any good, I will stick with the 920s, if not I will scrape a few more bob together and get Opty 165s.

As for Linux, ste_bla, I am a Linux noob. I have tried it in the past (Ubuntu) and managed to get the console to run but had a lot of difficulty getting it to work properly with my Windows network and ended up giving up. If someone could help me with that side of things I would consider it.

Thanks Billy. I should be ok with the noise - I work offshore so am used to sleeping with a fair bit of noise. I just want to keep it to a minimum because I have no idea how many of these things I will be building in the future.

As for immersion cooling, I was toying with the idea of trying it out on an old Duron I have lying around to see how it works, if it works, I may consider doing a few others.

I will try these two with the PSU in the case ukdave and see how they go and base future builds on my experiences with these (I can always replace the PSUs if they don't work out).

As for the RAM - the XMS2 5400 is the same price as the Corsair Value DDR2 PC4200 (this week only - but even normal price is only a fiver more - worth the little extra I would say )

Stan

Save yourself £100 Stan, we'll help you on the Linux side of things Its not all that big and scary, and even more so being as you're just going to set them folding and (I presume) for the most part leave them be.

Nice little learning exercise as well.

Otacon said:

Save yourself £100 Stan, we'll help you on the Linux side of things Its not all that big and scary, and even more so being as you're just going to set them folding and (I presume) for the most part leave them be.

Nice little learning exercise as well.

Click to expand...

Cheers Daz - appreciate it.

I've always wanted to get to grips with Linux but never really found the time to sit down and pay it the sort of attention it requires.

Will contact you once I get back from Egypt and get everything set up.

Which distro would you recommend so I can get it organised in advance?

Stan

I've not played with it myself (was planning to next week to satisfy my curiosity, so will report back), but many people seem to be using Ubuntu to help spring board them into Linux. Very user friendly apparently.

All of the bigger distros though (Fedora, Suse, Mandrake etc) have very accommodating installation wizards/programs these days to help you through it (though I'll admit it could ask someone that wasn't Linux savvy a couple of questions that you might not know the answer to, but that's what we're here for ), and once you get to a 'desktop' most people should be able to find their way to what they need.

It's certainly spot on for this scenario though. Even if you never go back to it, I promise it wont be difficult to get these rigs folding on Linux, and you can save some cash.

I'd go with this option:

CP-130-AM AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - OEM (CP-130-AM) 2
£89.95 £179.90
HS-015-AR Arctic Cooling Silencer 64 Ultra CPU Cooler (Socket 754) (HS-015-AR) 2
£4.95 £9.90
MB-042-GI Gigabyte K8N51GMF-9 nForce 6100 Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-042-GI) 2
£44.95 £89.90
MY-004-GL GeIL 512MB (2x256MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 (GE5123200BHDC) (MY-004-GL) 2
£27.95 £55.90
CD-036-PO Pioneer DVR-110BK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM (CD-036-PO) 1
£25.95 £25.95
HD-003-SA Samsung SpinPoint P SP0411N 40GB ATA-133 2MB Cache - OEM (HD-003-SA) 2
£29.95 £59.90
CA-002-OP Optronix Midi Tower Case - (Silver) 400w PSU (CA-002-OP) 2
£22.50 £45.00
Subtotal £466.45
VAT £81.63
Total £548.08

For <£550, you have two full A64 3000 systems. As stated above, just take a few hours to get Ubuntu installed and configured correctly and things will be fine.

You can easily get between 2.2 - 2.4 Ghz from both CPU's, and they will run fairly cool under the Artic Cooler heatsinks 24/7.

The onboard graphics are Nvidia based, which will help with Linux compatability.

One other thing to note is that I've only put in 512mb memory. If you are only running Folding@Home, that should be sufficient, and shouldnt impact on the output units at all.

What do you think? If you really want to go all out, you could have 3 of these boxes (complete with DVD-RW's and 1gb RAM) for the same price of the two systems you were originally considering.

Otacon said:

I've not played with it myself (was planning to next week to satisfy my curiosity, so will report back), but many people seem to be using Ubuntu to help spring board them into Linux. Very user friendly apparently.

All of the bigger distros though (Fedora, Suse, Mandrake etc) have very accommodating installation wizards/programs these days to help you through it (though I'll admit it could ask someone that wasn't Linux savvy a couple of questions that you might not know the answer to, but that's what we're here for ), and once you get to a 'desktop' most people should be able to find their way to what they need.

It's certainly spot on for this scenario though. Even if you never go back to it, I promise it wont be difficult to get these rigs folding on Linux, and you can save some cash.

Click to expand...

Sounds good to me.

I tried Ubuntu before and managed to get it working (eventually). I even managed to get the network bit working after many attempts but it went **** up and I had no idea how to get it up and running again as I couldn't remember how I'd got it to work in the first place

With a little help from my buddies at OcUK, I should (hopefully) be okay.

You're right in assuming that these rigs will be purely for Folding and will just be left to their own devices after setting up - although I may resurrect the old 1200 Duron and experiment with that once I get a slightly better understanding of it.

Stan

Dace said:

I'd go with this option:

CP-130-AM AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - OEM (CP-130-AM)
£89.95 £89.95
HS-015-AR Arctic Cooling Silencer 64 Ultra CPU Cooler (Socket 754) (HS-015-AR)
£4.95 £9.90
MB-042-GI Gigabyte K8N51GMF-9 nForce 6100 Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-042-GI)
£44.95 £89.90
MY-004-GL GeIL 512MB (2x256MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 (GE5123200BHDC) (MY-004-GL)
£27.95 £55.90
CD-036-PO Pioneer DVR-110BK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM (CD-036-PO)
£25.95 £25.95
HD-003-SA Samsung SpinPoint P SP0411N 40GB ATA-133 2MB Cache - OEM (HD-003-SA)
£29.95 £59.90
CA-002-OP Optronix Midi Tower Case - (Black) 400w PSU (CA-001-OP)
£22.50 £45.00
Subtotal £376.50
VAT £65.89
Total £442.39

For <£500, you have two full A64 3000 systems. As stated above, just take a few hours to get Ubuntu installed and configured correctly and things will be fine.

You can easily get between 2.2 - 2.4 Ghz from both CPU's, and they will run fairly cool under the Artic Cooler heatsinks 24/7.

The onboard graphics are Nvidia based, which will help with Linux compatability.

One other thing to note is that I've only put in 512mb memory. If you are only running Folding@Home, that should be sufficient, and shouldnt impact on the output units at all.

What do you think? If you really want to go all out, you could have 4 of these boxes for the same price of the two systems you were originally considering.

Click to expand...

That looks quite tempting actually. The only thing is that you only have 1 CPU in your total so adding another takes it to about £550 - still pretty good price though. I'm tempted because I have a 3500+ Venice and it gives me around the same PPD as my 4000+ San Diego.

Thanks for that option mate

Stan

Bigstan said:

That looks quite tempting actually. The only thing is that you only have 1 CPU in your total so adding another takes it to about £550 - still pretty good price though. I'm tempted because I have a 3500+ Venice and it gives me around the same PPD as my 4000+ San Diego.

Thanks for that option mate

Stan

Click to expand...

#

It was edited. You git

Dace said:

#

It was edited. You git

Click to expand...

At the same time I posted, noob

Stan

I have decided to build one rig using the 920 and two "Dace specials" and compare them. Future builds will depend on the relative output (PPD) of the two systems.

In honour of Dace, I will be naming all the rigs in the farm after fish

Stan

Bigstan said:

I have decided to build one rig using the 920 and two "Dace specials" and compare them. Future builds will depend on the relative output (PPD) of the two systems.

In honour of Dace, I will be naming all the rigs in the farm after fish

Stan

Click to expand...

Did you know the latin for Dace is leuciscus leuciscus?

Did you know that the Dace is the smallest member of the carp family?

All good fun

*Buy 3 Dace specials and forget about the 920 *

Good pick Stan. You'll have to tell us how they do.

When the QMDs come back, it'll be Intel time. I hear all these people rattling on about ppd, but when it came right on down to it I had 3 840EE's doing 900ppd each on 4 threads of F@H.

Buying the kit is only the first part. The power consumption of these things is enormous - My 3 Intel rigs were consuming 1800W between them - that's like 90 energy saver lightbulbs just running continuously. To get that sort of output you'd need at least 6 dual core AMDs - if not 8. That's almost 4kW of power!

If you go for more machines - do consider the running costs as well. More threads per psu is better for the planet and your pocket.

And the QMDs are coming back soon.

WJA96 said:

When the QMDs come back, it'll be Intel time. I hear all these people rattling on about ppd, but when it came right on down to it I had 3 840EE's doing 900ppd each on 4 threads of F@H.

Buying the kit is only the first part. The power consumption of these things is enormous - My 3 Intel rigs were consuming 1800W between them - that's like 90 energy saver lightbulbs just running continuously. To get that sort of output you'd need at least 6 dual core AMDs - if not 8. That's almost 4kW of power!

If you go for more machines - do consider the running costs as well. More threads per psu is better for the planet and your pocket.

And the QMDs are coming back soon.

Click to expand...

That was pretty much my line of thinking too but I wanted to try the "Dace specials" as a sort of experiment to check the points/£ of both options.

I have also priced an Opteron version as follows:

CP-151-AM AMD Opteron UP 165 Dual Core San Diego 1.8GHz 2MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-151-AM) 1
£229.95 £229.95
HD-025-SA Samsung SpinPoint P HD040GJ 40GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-025-SA) 1
£29.95 £29.95
CA-002-OP Optronix Midi Tower Case - (Silver) 400w PSU (CA-002-OP) 1
£23.95 £23.95
MB-119-AS Asus A8N-VM CSM Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI Express Motherboard (MB-119-AS) 1
£54.95 £54.95
MY-061-CS Corsair 1GB DDR Value Select PC3200 CAS3.0 Kit (2x512MB) (VS1GBKIT400C3) (MY-061-CS) 1
£54.95 £54.95
Subtotal £393.75
VAT £68.91
Total £462.66

I may have to get one of these as well to check the points/£ of that (and because I've never had an Opteron ). Will have to see what the cashflow situation is when I get back from Egypt - the Opteron may have to wait a while

Stan