Now I have two i7-920 systems generating PPD (albeit not 24hrs yet) I am keen to increase my PPD. Both machines have 9800GTX+, which if run 24hrs/day should produce 5000+ PPD each (according to FAHmon). I can move one card to the other machine which I can then run 24hrs/day for 10k+ PPD. So I want to buy a new Nvidai card for my "main" machine. I'm not a gamer, so it will be complete overkill w.r.t. my requirements. I've looked through the last 18 issues of CPC to get an idea of how the cards stack up w.r.t. PPD. Since I don't follow GFX card development I am not clear on the history of Nvidia cards and how they stack up. I even read that the GTS250 is more or less a 9800GTX? In one CPC review the GTX 295 was shown as only producing ~7500 PPD. Was this a mistake? Perhaps the card operates in SLI (and I read that this must be disabled for folding)? I'm looking for a simple table (such as often found in CPC) which shows card vs PPD, for a big range of Nvidia cards. Can anyone point me to a website which might have this information? I've also been visiting various websites to look at the price of cards. I'm seeing certain cards are no longer available or have limited availability (GTX 275, GTX 295) and I was puzzled why. Finally any PPD numbers on the new GTX 470 cards? Novatech (who are local to me) stock these cards, and the prices seem better than the GTX 295. regards... --Badsector
This is what you want to have a read through mate - http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rPxBAP4EIhFfADzwidpb2Lg&output=html And if your not already taking part why dont you pop in and join are annual chimps challenge, have a read of this thread and get those i7's working for the team Hope to see you in there bud - http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=186233
I'd be tempted to say overclock your two 920s to somewhere around 4Ghz and run bigadvs 24/7. This would get you around 50Kppd minimum for both machines, way more than you'd get off the GPUs. If you can afford the electric then look at adding the GPUs too. GPUs tend to use more electric than cpus.
There's a rough and ready guide to achieving a 3.8GHz OC on i7 920's laid out in Issue 77 (Feb) of CPC (pages98/99) providing you have a decent after market cooler fitted (which you have). I used it as basis for my system and everything went quite smoothly. Once up and running you can tweak to your hearts content.
I haven't helped out here much recently () so I'll do this: Absolutely correct. As far as folding PPD goes anyway. They may as well have just rebranded it, they changed so little I own one of both. 7500 PPD is per core. The 295 is a dual core card so you double that for a single cards PPD. The folding application just treats each core as a seperate card. You do have to have SLI disabled for folding on GPUs. They are easily capable of 15K PPD per card with the proper cooling and the right WUs Welcome to my world. I've been hunting down GTX 295's recently as well. The story with them and the other GTX 2xx series cards is that after they were EOL'd, people snapped the remaining stock up very quickly (mostly at lower than usual retail prices) and the suppliers (yeah, all of them!) ran out of top end cards very quickly. eBay and the marketplace on here are your best bets mate. I need 3x 295's for my next build and have none to date To the best of my knowledge, the stats aren't in yet. Any that you see are probably faked because the current GPU(2) client doesn't run on the 4xx cards. Stanford have said that GPU3 is on the way though. Again, I haven't been following this situation closely, so for all I know, GPU3 has been released and the 480 can be folded on Hope this helps! Oh, and welcome to the team
GPU3 is not out yet. The folding results you see in the press for 4xx were done with a demo system built by nVidia, so should be taken with a pinch of salt. My *guess* looking at other performance numbers for these cards, is that they will not be worse for folding than the high end 2xx series; any increase in points that they will give has to be considered with the extra electricity bills, heat and noise in mind. Frankly, if you want to spend some money now, and get good points, build a system around a six-core Intel processor and run -bigadv on it. PS Stanford have got as far as issuing a request for folders to update their graphics drivers in preparation for the release of GPU3 - I'm holding back until the client has been released and tested in the wild.
I just want to thank Norfolk'N'Good, coolamasta (who I appear to be local to), and Unicorn, who all made really helpful posts. I knew that the data was there somewhere! I'm happy to join CustomBitChimps (I did follow the link), but I wasn't clear what I had to do. If it's just changing the team number, I didn't spot what it was (which knowing me means that it was the thing in massive bright red flashing font at the top of the screen, which for some reason I didn't notice!). Thanks to cdb and 1Razor for their overclocking suggestions. While I was putting the two systems together I did try overclocking both boards/CPUs, and the article in CPC was perfect for me. Unfortunately both CPUs are C0/C1 stepping. The P6T SE + air cooler just won't overclock at all :-(. The P6T V2 + liquid cooler overclocked to only around 3GHz (BCLK 133->150). I did adjust all the voltages too, but without success. I considered going out and getting a D0 stepping, but I'll put the money towards a GFX card for folding instead. regards... --Badsector
Badsector, a C0 shouldn't overclock that much worse than a D0 - it should do well over 3GHz. What BIOS settings/BIOS rev do you have?
badsector, if you want to fold for CustomBitChimps, change your user name to CustomBitChimps and your team number should be 35947.
Does your motherboard have an auto overclocking mode? my Asus board does. It might be your memory timings that are messing you around. When I first tried overclocking my board I couldn't go up more than about 5 on the bclk before it would crash. The memory timings were going up automatically and screwing things up. I automode over clocked it and then pushed it abit further myself to 3.8. Mine's an I7 860 though.
While I was looking at the Stanford ranks, I noticed someone who had a username of "CustonBitChimps. Perhaps someone could inform them? OK, I'll change names and add some point to the CPC Chimps effort. --Badsector
Thanks, Badsector. Someone already mentioned "CustonBitChimps" but we have no way of knowing who it is. I think there was someone with an "_" underscore at the end of the name. Update: CustomBitChimps_ has 1,731 points CustonBitChimps has 19,341 points There is a user called CustomBitChimpsteam=35947 with 3,250 points There is a user called CustomBitChipms with 268 points
Just checked these (Monday morning) in Extreme Overclockers Stats. No new points gained for at least 24 hours (some 48), so I guess the typos have been sorted out.
