Mega Beastie!

verbal

verbal

verbal

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Joined
17 May 2006
Posts
1,189
Location
Manchester, UK
Well ok. Maybe a better name would be "ebay special". Eat your heart out Biffa/Stan ;)

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Motherboard: Asus P5K: £20
CPU: Intel E5200: £25 (from dekez)
RAM: 2Gb Corsair DDR2: £28
GFX1: 8800GS 384mb: £27
GFX2: 9600GSO 384mb: £28
FANS: 2x 120mm Yate Loon: £6

Total Cost: £134

Case, laptop HDD and PSU all spare and were just sitting doing nothing in my flat.

Currently doing 11600ppd but I can get more out of it than that. I narrowly missed out on a K9A2 platinum on ebay, got distracted as the auction was ending. They're so hard to find now.
 
:D nice. I'm only mildly disappointed* that it wasn't that new overclockable dual-socket i7 mobo with two hexa-core i7s and 7 watercooled GTX 295s.



*most displeased :p
 
Yeah, and lots of people do*. In terms of boards that have 4 double-spaced PCI-E slots that take DD2 (for cost reasons) there's only the K9A2 platinum and the P6N Diamond (775) both made by MSI, that I know of.

*including dekez, didgemaster and KE1HA on here.
 
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cool - thats good to know, I though AMD boards could only run crossfire when using more than 1 gfx
I have been browsing around since seeing biffa's wee beastie thread, but was put of by the cost of the mobo, cpu, which are a waste for a crunching machine.
All I wanted was a cheap 4 x pci-e board that I could stick the cheapest cpu/RAM I could find in and spend the money on gfx cards for the crunching.
Will start looking at some amd boards now, as they will be cheaper and I can bung a cheap amd cpu in there
Chears for the heads up verbal - you might have saved me some cash :D
 
My 4GHz i7 can do about 15k PPD if I don't game or anything and I get the good WUage. It can do much, much more if it ran bigadv!

It takes two GTX260s to get that much. My Q6600 at stock can do at least 3.5K PPD! CPUs aren't out of the race yet!
 
Brilliant mate and so simple, a lesson to us all, it does'nt have to be all about spending tons of money:)

Going to have a dig around to see what I can do. :D
 
SiriusB said:
My 4GHz i7 can do about 15k PPD if I don't game or anything and I get the good WUage. It can do much, much more if it ran bigadv!

It takes two GTX260s to get that much. My Q6600 at stock can do at least 3.5K PPD! CPUs aren't out of the race yet!
Click to expand...

I'm in full agreement SB. My i7 920 @ 4.2GHz gives me about 22k on SMP (A3) if it's doing nothing else and will give close to 30k on bigadv. It would take 4 GTX260s to get that much - which would be much more expensive to buy and to run if you buy new.

CPC/Bit-Tech regularly spec up Folding machines and their latest recommendation has one of the MSI boards with 4 GTS250s on it. They quote the price for building it at £715 (I see no mention of a case - probably because there would be a lot of heat generated and it would be best to run it nekkid). If you run that system with SMP on the CPU as well, you'll probably get about 26-27k ppd as a dedicated Folding rig.
You can build a budget spec i7 rig with the new 930 chip (which will OC higher than the 920) for around £800 (this includes a GTS250 for the gfx) running bigadv on that with a GPU client on the 250, you'll easily get around 35k ppd - maybe more. The i7 rig should use less power as well, making it cheaper to run.

27k/£715 = 37.76 ppd/£
35k/£800 = 43.75 ppd/£

My conclusion:
CPU Folding, far from being less desirable when building a dedicated Folding rig, is the way to go if building brand new from scratch - more ppd/£ and cheaper to run.

Secondhand is a different matter. You can't get i7 components cheap secondhand yet so, as verbal has proved in this thread, it is possible to build cheap Folding rigs with decent ppd for little money. Even if he'd had to buy everything secondhand, he could still have built that rig for around £200.
12k/£200 = 60 ppd/£.

Nice one verbal :cool:

Edit: Having said all that, we need to take ppd/Watt into consideration. In order to match the 35k output of my i7 rig, verbal would need three of his secondhand rigs which (apart from taking up a lot more space) will use considerably more power than my i7 rig. In the long term, all things considered, CPU Folding is still the way to go.
 
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Very interesting post Stan..

Im lucky I s'pose as the power consideration doesn't come into it as my box will sit in an air-conditioned test room at work which is the one reason why I am even considering it. Couln't afford the leccy if it was at home running 24/7
The problem I am facing is one of cost as this is a machine that will be built up over a period of months as I get paid

I can get one of the AM2 or 775 MSI boards for £100 off the bay, I am leaning towards the AMD as I can get a cheap Phenom and drop it in, to give me a bit extra.
i7 does appeal, but the extra cost makes me nervous, £400 for a cpu and board with 4 pci-e vs £200 for the AMD solution
There isn't that much choice around when you want a mobo to support 4 gfx cards
Im looking to spend as near to £350 on the cpu/mobo/case/ram/ 1 x gfx and then add more gfx cards as I get paid, Im thinking of filling it with 9800 GX2 as there are loads of them on the bay and they have a higher SP count 256 vs 240 for the 260/275/280/285
Im cant decide on a case, buying a cheap case and leaving it open to take advantage of the A/C is an option, but Im worried about someone nicking one of the cards if I do, as the desktop guys are in that room grabbing parts and testing. If the case is going to be closed up then I need to think about buying a better case to handle the heat output of 4 gfx cards, but spending £150 on a case is defeating the object of trying to put a budget crunching rig together

I will have a look at the bit-tech site, and I will also have a look at buying more of the bits 2nd hand as I tend to sell on parts, but never buy them 2nd hand, especially from the bay, maybe I need to change that as that would reduce my costs
At least browsing the web and doing the research is a fun way to spend a weekend. :p
 
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I wouldn't worry about someone nicking a GPU - if they are going to steal, opening the side panel on a case isn't going to slow them down. Unless of course you get one you can lock! :)

If the whole thing is going to be in a room with AC then I don't see being in a case will be a problem - especially if you can get GPUs that fire out most/all their air out the back of the case.
 
Plus noise isn't going to be a problem so you can get a cheap case and shove all fans to max for added effect. If buying a new case, you can get pretty damn good ones now for <£50.
 
good points, Im browsing the ocuk site now for purchase next month. Need to be careful though, not all cheap towers will take 4 dual width cards, a lot actually say 3 cards when digging deeper through the specs
have just ordered the k9a2 - got to put this in motion or toxic and halz will overtake me next year :p
 
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& the bargain hunter award goes to ---- Verbal:)
Well done that man!

Recently put my brothers rig into an Akasa Xone. It has a 140mm top fan & rear 120mm.
Don't know how many gfx cards it'll take above 2.
 
verbal said:
Yeah, and lots of people do*. In terms of boards that have 4 double-spaced PCI-E slots that take DD2 (for cost reasons) there's only the K9A2 platinum and the P6N Diamond (775) both made by MSI, that I know of.

*including dekez, didgemaster and KE1HA on here.
Click to expand...

Project cheapskate is not finished yet. The PSU that I bought is currently being RMA'd. It is currently running with an old PSU and only 1 8800GT - I will let you know when it is finished
 
edgedemon said:
good points, Im browsing the ocuk site now for purchase next month. Need to be careful though, not all cheap towers will take 4 dual width cards, a lot actually say 3 cards when digging deeper through the specs
have just ordered the k9a2 - got to put this in motion or toxic and halz will overtake me next year :p
Click to expand...

Next year!....i was kindof hoping a little sooner;):D
 
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