Some people expressed interest in the hardware I used for my folding machine which has been up and running for a month now. Rather than resurrect the old thread I thought I would give my opinions on how things have gone here: Antec Skeleton Case: I have only good things to say about the case itself... well, if there were 2mm more clearance above the 4th PCI slot on my mobo that would be ideal (see below). One note of caution, the instructions it comes with are entirely useless and the manual on the web specifically tells you to do things incorrectly at roughly every other step. Some common sense got me through though, a very easy install once I stopped looking at the instructions. Compact Flash HDD: Despite some fears over lifetime, it still loads XP very quickly and has performed admirably over all. 4Gb is just barely enough for the OS, 4 FAH installs, Nvidia drivers, Fahmon and Rivatuner, and the mobo drivers. I literally could not fit another program on there now though, so for my farm (coming next year), it'll be 8Gb cards. Zalman VF1000: Four of these guys cooling things down now. First off, they are very near silent. 4 GPUs in a case next to me and its quieter than the fridge in the next room, astounding. 2 of the cards are now hovering just below 70C while on 511 pointers, 1 card (in the last position, therefore able to exhaust air most effectively) is at 55C on a 768 pointer. The card in slot 3 is up at 80C on a 511 though, the reason for this being that the 4th card is being bent by the case frame so that the gap between the two cards is extremely narrow. Overall though, these have been a great purchase. The heatsink's only copper so I'm going to try bending things a bit to fit the 4th card properly and see if that improves things. Edit: So I had a closer look and feel like a right donut, the 4th card was bent to the extent that it totally stopping the fan on the 3rd card from turning, can't believe I didn't realise. Anyway, some very rough and ready modding to space the cards now has all 4 cards with fans running. slots 2 and 3 are on 511s at 58 degrees C, the 4th slot card is at 52 degrees on a 768 pointer and the 1st slot, which doesn't benefit as much from an exhaust fan i've hooked up, is running a 511 pointer at 66 degrees C. Now I'm just blown away by these coolers, on average they've dropped temps 17 degrees on each card. I have realised that the card which was operating without a fan was delivering the same temp as the stock cooling WITH a fan... truly awesome. For those who read my build thread, one of the cards from ebay died very quickly but too late for me to get my money back replaced it this week with an EVGA 512Mb model which, for some reason, Rivatuner sees as having a shader clock of 600MHz and can't OC when looking at driver settings. It actually has a clock of 1512MHz in the monitor view and is producing in line with that shader clock speed but it looks like its staying there unless anyone has any ideas on the cause/solution of this.
I can't really see how the Antec Skeleton is good for temps tbh with you, and it's the only reason I haven't bought one to try yet. The Dangerden airbox testbed that I have in the workshop has awful temperatures with any of the panels off, and that's with all of the 120mm mounts filled and several additional fans blowing air into the system. I find that a case that is totally enclosed cools components much more effectively because the airflow in the case is engineered to hit every component. I'm glad to hear the Zalman is working out for you because I was worried at first that they weren't going to be effective enough for folding, same for the CF cards. I'd buy 8Gb ones if I was going to run the OS off one in my farm, but at the moment 20Gb, 2.5" laptop (and xbox) hard drives are working fine for me
You're right uni, at first the skeleton wasn't great for temps (it would probably lose out to a HAF 932 for example) but now I have an exhaust fan right next to the cards, it's really pretty good. I don't have to worry about hotspots and its very easy to change things around. Really though I got the skeleton because its just something a bit different. As for the CF card, the plan is use them in mineral oil submerged nodes in a farm where mechanical HDDs would be a pain since they'd have to be outside the oil and vibrationally dampened from the aluminium "tubs" I plan on using. This way I can just have the (probably 2) PSUs of each node sitting on a grilled lid so that any oil that wicks up cables just falls back into the tub. Wicking along ethernet cables remains my only problem that doesn't have an elegant solution at this stage, wondering if just having a switch with the ports facing down over one of the nodes would do it
