F@H - BigDave Rig or GPU's

KE1HA

KE1HA

KE1HA

Associate
Joined
3 Jul 2004
Posts
866
Location
Helena, Montana
Hello All,

Been a long time since I've been active on F@H, and from the looks of it, the landscape has changed a fair bit.

I still have about 10 to 12 usable GPU's mostly 9800 GT's, couple 8800 GT's and 2x GTX-280's, however, from what I've been reading, GPU's are not the flavor of the day with respect to PPD anymore.

So the question is, should I retool for one of these 48 core Opteron BigDave Rigs (Intel would be nice, but way to much $$ fer MP's) and use my quad cores for SMP without the GPU's or go back and retool for higher end GPU's?

Just looking for the most bang fer the buck as it were. If the Opteron is the way to go, what Motherboards / PSU combination would you recommend?

Hope your all doing well and look forward to getting back into the points chase, although, looking at some of the PPW now days, there's some pretty stout competition at the top of Team-10 :cool:
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Long time no foldy... good to see you back

If you've loads of money then the top two players in the team are running Quad opteron CPUs (12 cores each). I think they're are running F@H bigadv units although they may be running bigbeta units (if they are still available) and hammer out loads of PPD. This is the way to go if you can afford it.

for less than half the money you could go with an EVGA SR2 with a couple of xeons running again with the F@H bigadv/bigbeta units. Of course there are other options - Asus do the KGPE motherboard that will take 2 opterons. I think Biffa mentioned that the motherboard he is using doesn't have to hve all 4 CPU sockets full to run so you can increase the machines capability as budget allows. I think its bulldozer compatible too here is the link to his thread.

You need 12 cores to run bigbeta. That and bigadv (if you have less than 12 cores) will give you the best PPW - running under linux (there is a VM image here for 8 core CPUs - if you are running more than 8 cores then run it natively)

The GPU3 and to a lesser extent the GPU2 client have a significant impact on the CPU clients so if you are investing in a monster cpu folding rig don't bother with a decent graphics card

If its PPW you're after then the F@H bigadv/bigbeta is the way to go with lots of CPU cores.

If like me you can't afford monster machines then the i7 2600K is a great cpu to fold on. Running a GPU client could be an option as it will probably increase your PPD more than you'll lose from the CPU. Of course this will lower you PPW.

What ever you choose let us know or let us know a budget and I'm sure we can advise
 
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Traditional CPU folding seems to be a winner in terms of brute efficiency. Needless to say it is a far more mature platform for floating point computation and Stanford scoring method favors it in that respect. After all, stability and accuracy is what counts in scientific research. :)

But I'm sure there will be changes in the future. Especially with AMD pushing the APU concept and the eventual merger of a mid line GPU on to a capable consumer CPU die becoming standard, as competitors follow or set their own trends. That's the best of both worlds, surely! :D
 
I have gone down the 48 core opteron route and i think if you hang on until interlagos (opteron 6200 series) is released (end of august) then you might pick up some cheap 6100 series opterons as people upgrade.

Still not going to be cheap but supermicro(H8QGi series, newer H8QGL dont seem to be available in the UK yet) and tyan(S8812) are 4p boards with supermicro getting my vote as overclocking the base clock is possible.

Neither are easy to package and you wil have to consider the price of a huge case(or go without:))

Power wise a single 12v rail and large capacity, im running an AX1200 but only as i have ES chips that overclock:)
 
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I think I'm going to go the route Biffa took, that's a nice looking rig, and i can start out with v8's and move up to v12's when the price is a bit better. Then I'll have a second rig to build with the v8 pulls.

I like the Supermicro route as well due to DDR3 v.s ECC, that's a major expense for nothing more than a folding rig. If it were a production server, then of course ECC would win that choice.

As for packaging, this one is going to have 4x machines in it, 2x of these BigDave deals, and 2 x 3x GTX-560's deals, but that's going to take some time ( and $$ ) to pull t all together.

Mr. Biffa, I saw some pic's of your nearly finished rig, what's the model number on the CPU H2O coolers you use?
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