Ordered a ZOTAC P106-090 mining card

[unrealrocks]

Results to follow!

I had been reading some mixed opinions about using ex-mining cards for Folding, but given it seems for a large part (at the lower end anyway) mining is dropping away, these lower end mining cards are worth very little so I thought it would be an interesting thing to try out!

Picked it up for around £35 delivered from China, I've also ordered a 16x to 1x riser card - I am going to be interesting to try it both with and without this as I've read they have a greater effect on Folding than mining given how data intensive Folding can be as opposed to mining. This might be a total failure but I thought it would be an interesting experiment and seeming not a huge amount of information out there. There are a few videos which suggest these cards can Fold fairly reasonably but hugely conflicting information out there, it seems some cards only run at the lower PCIe speed and some can use more channels.

Will post an update when the card arrives - given it's coming from China, who knows when it might be!

 

[unrealrocks]

Second hand cards are a yes, but I would not be buying from China when there are dodgy replicas and fakes. Hope it turns out ok for you though.

Yeah I do agree, this was through eBay so I likely have some comeback if it's junk, that said for the sake of £30 I'm not hugely fussed ... If it was a high end card then very different story! Got my 2070 Super from OcUK infact haha

 

[unrealrocks]

Quick update, the card arrived (surprisingly quickly for China!) and then ended up lightly 'modifying' an old test machine I had lying around (didn't really fancy putting an unknown graphics card into a machine worth more than 45 pence haha). After some faffing with drivers and a quite a bit of head scratching seems we are Folding! So far early indications seem to suggest around the 250k PPD mark which is pretty reasonable. It seems to only connect at PCIe 4x which I think is the card and not this machine (that said I've never stuck anything in the PCIe slot of these old 3020s).



Going to let it run for a day or so then will try a few of the different adaptors down to 4x and 1x to see if it affects performance at all. If not I may get a few more of these as they are stupidly cheap for their Folding performance it seems!

 

[unrealrocks]

I think its meant to be a 1060, does it have no video out? But yeah for £35 its good cruncher, they would have been about £250 in the mining boom.

Yeah I believe they are based around the 1060, and yes no video outputs, or SLI connector!

I'll have a look as to how easy it is to remove the cooler to get a proper photo of the board at some point. Possibly next month I may buy another couple of these as they are quite fun to fiddle with! Also I still want to test it with a pcie 1x slot, I tried adding it to my main machine with an RTX 2070 Super in the 16x slot and it wouldn't even boot - my little test setup doesn't have enough 6 pin power connectors to power the external PCIe slot so need to get a few more bits!

 

[unrealrocks]

Does it have 3Gb memory?

The 6Gb flavour (if exists) would be a decent entry mining card. Although any of them would be useful to crunch BOINC projects on.

No this is a 3GB card (the GPUZ screenshot further up has all the exact details). I think that is why the cost of these sorts of cards has fallen through the floor, they aren't useful for mining anymore but for folding/boinc they seem pretty good! It's been running for a few days Folding now and seems to be settled around the 330k PPD for around 60-70watts of power.

 

[unrealrocks]

Quick update on this, I will write this up with some more details at some point!

After finding someone who had quite a few of these cards spare I have now got 5 of them haha. My Plex server has a load of 4x pcie slots so planning to run them through the 1x pcie risers remotely as it doesn't seem to make a huge difference in PPD (can't tell exactly as the WUs seem to vary wildly anyway). Will prob keep one in a 16x slot just for conparison. Currently having to work out how to power all these 6 pin connectors remotely from the PSU in my server haha.