Quad Socket Monster

Jamiman

Jamiman

Jamiman

Associate
Joined
16 Oct 2010
Posts
618
Location
Nottingham
Hey all,

MY school approved the funding for the project, so we are go!

Got a budget of £2000, so thinking a Quad socket G34 board is the way to go!

Got a few quotes, cheapest I found was £1573 for the board, 4 processors and coolers.

Then, 32GB of RAM talkes us another £100 up (or £160...depends if I want to trust the OCUK ValueRAm :S)

750W OCZ PSU should be enough.....not sure about whether it needs 4 CPU power lines?

Getting a hard disk/disk drive from an old machine.

Might put my old 4870 in it, so there's some nice animations going on for the governors to look at...unless it's a massive performance hit :P

Then the case......currently I am going to be making this myself, from Acrylic/Aluminium. Should be able to make something which has nice airflow then...might even make ducting to go over the CPU's....depends.

Also, does this mean that I will need to run 32 instances of the CPU client (32 cores)

Will post a build log when I get further along the line in the build....
 
Just run SMP -bigadv on it, no need to run 32 single core clients as bigadv will decimate their output.
What OS are you going to run? Linux gives much better PPD than Windows.
As for the PSU, not sure what power connectors you'll need as they can vary between boards and I'm no G34 guru, but I'd consider something other than the ZS, it's not a great unit.
 
Umm... make sure of that quote as my experience is that the board alone is going to cost you £1400 plus VAT

Unless you go second hand of course. :)

Make sure you are looking at G34 quad socket motherboards, e.g. the SuperMicro H8Q range of boards

I'd reccomend at least a 850W good quality single rail PSU, probably a Corsair.

Memory make sure you get a board that can take unregistered sticks, currently only the SuperMicro boards can do that. Otherwise your memory prices will go through the roof as you will need Registered ECC memory.
 
Yeah, currently getting the Supermicro H8QGI-F, which supports non ECC RAM up to 128Gb...as I'm only putting 32GB in, that shouldn't be an issue.

Got a couple of quotes from various places, all were around the same figure. The company I'm ordering from seems to have plenty of good reviews, and more importantly, I've not found any bad reviews yet (apart from one guy complaining about their customer service...but that out of 30 others seems ok to me - hell, OCUK has more complaints than that!)

But, that aside i'll check out the single rail Corsair PSU's on here.....something like an TX850 i guess is the way to go then?

And yeah, currently planning to run it on Linux.
 
If you need another pair or eyes let me know, email is in my OcUk trust, as I've built three of these now for different clients :) and its easy to get caught out.

There is some interesting tidbits of info in this thread

Plus if your prices are accurate I'd love to know where you are getting them from, because the last place I got my motherboards from has almost doubled their prices! :(

BaBa also has built a few of these rigs and has a wealth of experience in getting them to perform at optimum levels. :cool:
 
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I might trust you a few questions in the coming weeks, as and when they're needed :P Thanks for the offer m8 :)

and if they honour their quote i'll send you a link to the company :)

Only thing that's puzzling me ATM (aside from converting all the measurements on this SWTX motherboard design to CM from inches :D) is what you need to do with the 8 pin ports next to the 24 pin on the mobo. do these taket eh GFX power or what? I thought at first it was the CPU 8 pin, but noticed there's 2? Or do I need to be a little creative with my soldering iron? :D

Might take me a while to figure Linux out though......but meh, that's half the fun! :D
 
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What cpus was the quote including?

The 8 pins next to the 24pin connector are normal 8 pin cpu connectors, usually only server psus have several of these but you an get converters to use pcie connectors on them instead if using a consumer psu. (btw the 8 pin pcie connectors have 5 neutral and 3 12v cables, the cpu 8 pin have 4 of each)
 
Biffa said:
Plus if your prices are accurate I'd love to know where you are getting them from, because the last place I got my motherboards from has almost doubled their prices! :(
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Do you think these might be pre-VAT prices as the OP is ordering for a 'business'?
 
I also order for a business :) but the prices have gone up a lot recently, so I am intrigued.

To the Op, the 8 pins are extra CPU connectors, you will normally have one on the PSU, but lots of mid to higher end PSU's are including them.
 
Ah ok. I guess i'll just have to get some adaptors if the PSU doesn't have em :)

I'll make a thread in the project log thing soon, and put some pics of the CAD i've been doing for the case.
 
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Looks good, don't forget you need 4 x 4 sticks of memory. With those corsair you'll end up with 64GB

See how you go with the adapters, some people have had issues with them, last time I built one I made sure I got a PSU that had the 8pin and a 4+4pin

But you will be fine probably.
 
jak731 said:
PSU looks fine, a gold or platinum rated supply would be nice but it's the school paying for leccy :p. You will probably need a couple of these:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CB-033-AK&groupid=1929&catid=153&subcat=

What speed are the cpus you're getting?
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Thanks for the link, i'll bear it in mind :)

And the CPU's are Opteron 6128 ones, rated at 2GHZ i believe :)

Biffa said:
Looks good, don't forget you need 4 x 4 sticks of memory. With those corsair you'll end up with 64GB

See how you go with the adapters, some people have had issues with them, last time I built one I made sure I got a PSU that had the 8pin and a 4+4pin

But you will be fine probably.
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I only got 32GB of RAM..... surely 1GB per core is enough? or is it quad channel mode you were thinking of?

And the adaptors will be the first thing I check if something goes awry :P
 
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Shame they're not 12 core, still pretty good though. There is no real world advantage of quad channel over dual channel (well marginal at best), my understanding is that it is easier to increase the number of slots of ram per cpu by increasing the number of channels rather than the number of sets of channels. (ie 2x quad channel imc easier than 4x dual channel imc). So servers usually support quad channel not for additional performance but for increased capacity.

Whether 32gb is enough depends on the units you're going to run, Biffa will be more help than me.
 
I wouldn't worry about running dual instead of quad channel, I know it's a different platform but if you look at the second set of tables here they find dual channel to be slightly faster than quad channel with the same memory speed.
 
Jamiman said:
Damn, the other memory has already been dispatched :S

Reckon it's worth me RMAing it and swapping it?
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If it was me yes.

jak731 said:
I wouldn't worry about running dual instead of quad channel, I know it's a different platform but if you look at the second set of tables here they find dual channel to be slightly faster than quad channel with the same memory speed.
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The different platform does make a difference, plus you have to really be testing Linux bigadv Folding@home performance. Tens of seconds per % WU can make 10's of 1000's of points difference per day.

In F@H the entire Workunit is loaded into memory and run from there, so memory bandwidth is very important in Folding, and why the MagnyCours do so well against the Xeons even with the clock speed differences.

This has the most dramatic effect on the 6903 and 6903 WU's
 
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Ok that shows the amd cpus have better memory bandwidth than the intels, but it doesn't show any difference on the amd system between dual/tri/quad channel as they didn't test for that. I will stop being skeptical (mainly caused by the lack of difference on the intel system, I would take your word for it otherwise) when if I see some evidence (couldn't find anyone who had tested the difference on the amd system when I looked earlier). Have you tested or seen the difference anywhere? Just want to make sure Jamiman isn't wasting his time if he sends the ram back.
 
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