Confusis's folding rigs plans

So far:
Project Think is folding 250ppd. Need to figure out how to raise that, P4 3ghz and HT.
Have a socket 603 board, dual Xeon 2.4ghz cpus coming, planning to SMP?
Going to ditch (strip+sell) the blade and put the opterons and ram in a atx/e-atx board so I can run gpus too!
Looking at something like this:
http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunderk8hm.html with a couple of 9600gt/gso's

Question: For the same budget I can buy 2x 9600GSO's or 1x GTX250. Which would get more PPD?

 

Hmm. If i can find NZ$500 I can buy a full Blade P series enclosure with PSU's and 4 blades already in it. Gah... What can I sell to raise the funds XD

 

WTF. I paid for the 603 board the same day as I paid for the CPUs and Heatsinks.
The CPU's, from the USA, have arrived
The Heatsinks, from Hong Kong, have arrived.

Board, from a city 3 hours drive away from me, has not.
do'h!

I'm heading towards an a-z of cpu cores!

Applebred - Duron 1800 i have sitting in a dead board
Barton - Athlon that barely works, came out of a blown caps board & Brisbane - Athlon 64x2 In Project Aurora
Coppermine - P3 Slot1 cpu from a server i have sitting somewhere without the integrated HSF
Dothan - Pentium M in the Mother in Law's laptop (we live with her)
Emotion Engine in the two PS2 Slims in the house
F
Geode - 300mhz in the thin clients I have
H
I
J
K
L
Morgan - Duron 900 looking for a home
Northwood - P4 in Project think & Celeron 2.6 sitting here waiting for a home
O
Prestonia - Dual Xeons waiting for the board to arrive & Prescott 775 on the PC next to me
Q
R
S
Troy - 2x Opterons I have waiting for a board
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Need to find a few more cpus XD
May try and get 26 different folding machines with a-z cores. Have to revise a couple though (can't fold on geode and ps2)

 

Hey guys, a quick question:

I'm having problems with the socket 603 board arriving from the seller (as in i haven't got it after 2 weeks!)

Which would produce more PPD? (assuming same HDD/Memory)
Dual 603 Xeon 2.4ghz with HT
Dual Socket 940 Opterons 2.6ghz single core

Just trying to figure out the first mobo to buy as i have a set of each of the cpus now.. :x

 

The more cores for SMP the better. At a guess I would say Dual 603 Xeon 2.4ghz with HT as this will give you four cores. The Opterons have better clocks but only 2 cores.

 

Mildly better clocks lol. The Opterons are 64 bit though... would a 64 bit OS help towards more PPD?

And another quick question. If I understand correctly socket 603 CPU's work in socket 604 boards. is this right?

(anybody have a spare dual 603/604 or 940 board around they can sell to me?)

 

A 64-bit OS will only help if you're running the bigadv client as it loves having lots of RAM to play with. However, the standard CPU client won't care if you're running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows/Linux.

 

The OS doesn't matter the 6.29 SMP2 client is no different on either 32 bit or 64 bit.

 

Cool, good to know. Might be running Windows Server 2k3 32bit which IIRC can see 64gb ram through some fancy programming?

Looking through ebay though my cheapest option is a Dual 940 board. With a single pciex16 slot. Hmmmmmmm

Dual 940 Board incl shipping US$64.63 w/ single pciex16
Dual 603 Board incl shipping US$138.65 w/pcix slots
Dual 604 Board incl shipping US$99.99 x/ pcix slots

I have 6x 512mb DDR sticks that suit all three boards.
IMHO the difference in between the prices would buy a GPU to help PPD if I went dual opteron for now. Hopefully the 603 board (that I have already paid for) will arrive eventually though.

 

Dont worry about RAM on the standard client, I've got a Fahcore_a3 process running at 131,016 K

 

Hmm. The difference between the prices means I could get an 8600gt off ebay. Worth it for folding?

edit: /me starts bidding on an 8800gt from a NZ seller instead of the 8600gt off ebay

 

You would get more PPD on the server board if you can find one.

I just googled 'PPD chart'

http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/a-ppd-chart-for-various-gpu-cards-t105074.html

The figues look a bit conservative & out of date but roughly accurate. The 8600GT is listed at 1800 PPD, a 4 core SMP client would net at least twice that.

 

ah. So here's hoping the idiot sends my xeon board to me :X
Unless I can find some cheap dualcore opterons.. The cheapest on ebay won't ship to NZ and the next cheapest is worth more than the board. Each. damn!

(BTW They're all server/workstation boards that I'm looking at)

 

Updates:
Bought a brand new ASUS K8N-DRE board for the Opterons. This board has a single pciex16 slot. Will be looking around for dual core opteron bargains to get into smp! (i had to refrain from bad rap music comments)

Actually tempted to build a semi gaming pc with it but I must refrain! Project Aurora must suffice and the newly christened 'Project Origami'.

Project think (P4 3.0ghz as in my sig) is being sold for parts and when the xeon board arrives it will be in Project Think's chassis.

Looking at designing a farm case though

 

That would've been Chronic

 

Those mutha.... forgot about K8N-DRE

XD

Ok back on topic. Need to invest in a decent power supply. The usual online PSU requirements calculator quotes 711 watts at full load for the system I want to build! :/
Should be ok until I get all the HDDs and GPU on the current PSU in the case though.

 

Confusis I'd bear in mind the PPD per watt factor when buying old hardware. You could end up spending a lot on electricity for relatively mediocre PPD. Obviously bearing the cost of new tech upfront can be prohibitive but just thought I'd mention it.

 

Yeah I have been thinking about that. However I do think these are ok to run as they will also be file servers and client servers. Points per watt aren't a huge issue on dual purpose systems for me as power in new zealand is sustainable and cheap.

 

Woo the guy has finally sent the dual xeon board. Lucky I have two e-atx cases. More ppd here I come!

 

Server question guys:
Would 1u active pure copper heatsinks contain the heat produced by 65w xeons during smp folding? hope so!