Best Ram For 100% load 24/7

IanBoyle

IanBoyle

IanBoyle

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1 Apr 2006
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117
Location
Central Scotland
Hello,
I'm setting up a second pc for the BBC's climate change model this involves the machine crunching on full load through millions of computations 24/7
It seems that you can get away with a moderately fast CPU but the ram is the crucial ( forgive the pun lol ) element here !

the system will comprise an AMD FX57 chip and the latest ASUS A8N-SLI PREMIUM mother board with other bits like an old ati 9700 pro graphics card and soundblaster Audigy sound card and sata drive but these will of course play no part in the PC's usage usually apart from making it work :)

The Ram is the problem though as I say speed is everything rather than size
the amount as long as it is least 1gig doesnt seem to matter from what I can gather though may be wrong

question is do I go for good pc 3200 and overclock it or get maybe PC 3700 or pc 4000 and overclock the sysem to reach its standard FSB

As you may be able to tell although I've had computers 25 years I'm not much of an overclocker so be gentle please lol

I'm hopefull of getting 3 gig out of my new chip which I've been assured is way possible safely without the use of nitrogen cooling :)

any help would be greatfully received
best wishes
Ian
 
Well the RAM that's rated at PC4000 is supposed to be able to reach those speeds, but you'll notice the timings aren't so great and a lot of the time those speeds are very optimistic. What I've noticed is RAM like the OCZ Platinum PC 3200, people have been able to overclock more than the RAM rated at the higher speeds.

Here is an article on the latest and great 2GB memory kits. If you have a look around, I'm sure you'll find some articles on 1GB kits.
 
Hi thank you for your very fast response :)
I've just got a matched kit of " 1GB (twin 512 meg ) OCZ PC3200 DDR Platinum rev 2 " for £80 from what I've seen in comments so far these seem to be at the higher end of the overclockable market :)

Having just found and had a look at the boinic section I see a lot of people going all out with there equipment but I may end up using this as my primary pc over time so no super fancy stuff for me :)

thanks again for your help

May be back about memory timing settings as those I don't understand lol but will wait till the machines built first

Ian
 
Building an FX57 based machine for crunching is certainly dedication! It's also perhaps not the best way to go about maximum production. For the price of an FX57, you could build two dedicated crunchers. Of course, if you've bought the chip now it's a bit late me telling you that.

One thing to be aware of is that a 9700 Pro is going to be an AGP card, whereas an A8N-SLI is a PCI-Express motherboard - so it won't have an AGP slot, and therefore the 9700 Pro isn't going to physically fit.

You did the right thing in getting two sticks of 512 MB as opposed to one stick of 1 GB, because CPDN benefits from dual-channel memory. So make sure you've got the sticks in seperate channels. Your motherboard manual will tell you what slots to put them in for dual-channel.
 
If you haven't bought it yet, get a dual core, then overclock it, 2x512Mb is fine and you dont need the SLI mobo, DFI-Ultra-D or Epox nForce 4 Ultra boards. Then a cheap PCI or PCI-E gfx as the 9700 will not fit.

Conc
 
Agree with the above posters.. in fact for pure 'crunching' IMO the best potential looks to be from an intel solution. Something like :-

CP-116-IN Intel Pentium 4 805 Dual Core "LGA775 Smithfield" 2.6GHz (533FSB) - Retail (CP-116-IN)
£79.95 £79.95
MB-084-AB Abit LG-81 Intel 945G Micro ATX (Socket 775) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-084-AB)
£64.95 £64.95
MY-030-GL GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX21GB5300DC) (MY-030-GL)
£64.95 £64.95
GX-016-HT HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 7000 64MB DDR TV-Out (PCI) - Retail (R7000-PTW64D) (GX-016-HT)
£19.95 £19.95
Subtotal £229.80
VAT £40.22
Total £270.02

Two of my rigs which crunch use Geil ram but really any ram will do.
 
Thanks guys,
the reason for the chip is quite simple I got it really cheap lol
I realize that if it was to sit in the corner and do nothing but crunch then the FX57 would have been bettered in crunching performance with 2 slower machines but as I say above this may end up within weeks being my main PC
as my main PC just now runs a Barton 3000+ so I may just like the performance boost way to much and use the new chip lol

well noted on the graphics card looks like the old machine is keeping its 9700 pro lol have to get a pci something I can maybe pair up later when funds permit

I had a look at the link above and the first set of tests against 1 gig modules was done using these OCZ as there benchmark stuff and on test it did extremely well in all the tests so kind of thought it had to be a winner lol

BigDom I'm very impressed to get that amount of pure crunching power in one place so cheap is quite a feet lol

Thanks for all your help
best regards
Ian
 
Yep I'd definatly upgrade your main machine to the FX57 but set crunching going on both.. Certainly with Folding which I do because it's priority is set to idle it just takes up spare CPU cycles. I can run intensive apps such as s fligth sim without any slowdown - the flight sim just means the folding is slower :).
 
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