i am thinking about pooling some money togeather to buy a dedicated folding rig that will not take up too much space. i was thinking of getting 2 295s in sli and an amd athlon x2 for it is this the best combo for a £1000 folding rig and what sort of case should i be looking at for this sort of heat (i can mod cases if nesasery) any help will be greatly aproved
The folders choice of cases for dedicated rigs is the Antec 300 at the moment. They are cheap (£45 atm on Scan.so.uk) and have plenty of cooling. I also looked at the Coolermaster HAF case for my second dedicated rig. High Air Flow, yes - but a bit too expensive just for housing a dedicated folding rig I decided. The Three Hundreds do just fine! Install an additional high CFM 120mm intake fan on the factory cut side panel mount and your cards will get plenty of air. Your combination of components is spot on I would say - The 2x 295's will yield you 4 GPU clients and you can fold with the SMP client on the A64 X2. I suggest you get the MSI K9A2 motherboard which will allow you to use that processor and will also allow you to upgrade to a couple more cards in the future as it has 4x PCI-E slots.
Don't enable SLI and the SLI cable is not needed for folding. The Antec Three Hundred might be the one you want. It has ventilation all the way up the front. I use a similar looking case, Maplin code A02GN, as they are about a mile and a half away so no postage. If this is a dedicated folding PC then you only need a CD ROM drive to install the operating system, does not have to be permanently fitted. Operating system Windows XP if you can get it. Does not need much memory for folding, 1 or 2 GB. Any old hard drive, it doesn't matter. The Athlon can be a weedy 45 Watt processor. Note that dedicated folding PCs are strange beasts. Not easy to sell if you get fed up of folding. If you really want to spend a lot on a folding PC, see the thread where Unicorn is planning on building one. I don't know if it is costed. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=168100 Edit: Sorry, that is an entire folding farm of PCs. There are others here who know more about this than me, but it might be Monday before they answer you.
Lol, I didn't even pick up on the SLI part! Well spotted And yes, my thread is in fact about building a farm in an 8 foot odd high server rack, but that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of other info in it to be picked up and used by the casual folder building a dedicated tower rig! Have a read, apart from killing an hour or three it'll hopefully give you some tips on cooling, overclocking, hardware and software setup and a general insight into how obsessed with folding I have actually become. W1n I say!
Sounds like a good combination. Check that the CPU supports virtualisation; if it does you can get more points by running Vmware and an SMP client. I think the 64 X2 series do, but best to doublecheck! The MSI K9A2 is a good choice of board as it has four PCI-E slots. I would go a step upwards for the case - Antec Nine Hundred Two. It has 8 expansion slots on the rear so you can fit four double thickness graphics cards if you wish to expand in the future. A good case will probably last longer than any of the components, so it's worth thinking ahead. You don't mention a PSU. Get a quiet one - Enermax, Corsair, Antec are generally good. A modular PSU can make cable management easier, especially if you go for a small case. Make sure it has enough 6- and 8-pin PCI-E plugs, you'll need one of each sort for each of your GTX295 cards. You'll need above 600W, and to avoid putting too much strain on the PSU I'd be looking for a 800W model. The PSU will be running all the time, and if it blows, it may take other components with it. Good luck with the build, and don't forget to join the CPChimps
thanks for all of that but i have 1 qestion as far as i know 3x gtx275 make the same ppd as 2x gtx295 they are also cheeper and give off less heat is this a better idea or have i got my facts muddled
No not quite mate, a gtx275 should make 8000ish at a push where as one half of a gtx295 will make 7000ish so: 3 x gtx275 = 24000ppd 2 x gtx295 = 28000ppd
