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Spec me a folding rig?

Ph4lanx

Ph4lanx

Ph4lanx

Associate
Joined
19 Apr 2010
Posts
474
Location
Surrey
Hi guys,

I'm looking to get into folding, and already have run some test runs on my server at home, but I want to build a dedicated folding rig.

I was wondering how cheap and decent can a folding rig get without being too OTT in terms of cost?

My basic look and feel would be:

2 x GPU
Antec 300 case (for size!)
Decent processor to handle possibility of upgrading to 4 GPUs at some point.
Processor to handle up to 4 GPUs
Mobo to handle up to 4 GPUs
Decent PSU to handle all this.
 
I'm no ultimate builder I'm afraid. i just wanted to build a machine to do my bit :)

What motherboard/CPU would you go for if it's AMD then? I've never actually used AMD, so a bit lost with them :(
 
Thanks for the starting point frozennova, I'll work on your template I think :) Looks solid. i'll see what can be swapped out mate. Cheers for the help.
 
Am I right in thinking I don't actually need SLI? Just plug the cards in and designate each process to a particular GPU right?
 
TheTross said:
I've read somewhere that you can leave SLI enabled for folding, though not having tried it myself I'm not sure. But no, you don't need it to be enabled.

By the way, welcome to the team :)

EDIT: This is where I saw it.
Click to expand...

Looks like they solved the need to have dummy plugs in that post aswell!
 
I heard VMWare was just another overhead and I might aswell just use the machine in a non-virtualised environment. Is this not the case?

I was looking at 9800GT's, so that's fine. OK so I'll work on a i7 rig principle then. Thanks for the comments.
 
I'm not touching Linux. I've had so many bad experiences with Linux I am never touching it again. I've seen loads of people run the -bigadv tag on Windows-based machines (well, at least in screenshots). Does this not work in Windows then? I'm sticking with Windows either way.

I'm not too worried about the i7 outlay. I've got some spare parts at home so I can save on things like the HDD and other small pieces like that, and the 9800GTs I'm getting second hand, so I'll be spending about £600 on things like mobo, cpu, case, memory and psu.
 
Because the one I already have is my gaming rig and cost slightly more than £600 in total :)

Also, does the folding rig really use 6GB of memory? Could I not half it? Or does it impact the folding?

Edit: I just realised the 6GB is to allow the VM to run smoothly. Apologies.
 
Last edited:
Wow, I'm impressed with that! However I don't have a PSU and case spare. I've only got a couple of harddrives spare at present, and I also want to use a quieter cooler than the stock one. :)

I dunno, I've never been very good at eBay hunting.
 
Ah OK, I didn't realise it was a certain number of posts. OK I'll just wait then and see (don't want to spam).

As for the Windows XP setup, my work has loads of single-licence copies of XP that come with every machine bundled, which they said that they are happy to hand to me for this purpose, so I'm OK with that :)
 
Oh, so the UD3R isn't really what I want? OK. I checked the Asrock aswell and that seems to only have 3 slots.

What 4-slot motherboards should I be looking at here?
 
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