Hi everyone. I came across an EVGA SR-2 rig for sale with some high end components. Would this be the good basis of a folding rig with all the slots available for graphics cards. It looks a bit of a dream machine but is it just old technology by now? It has 2 x Quad Core Xeon's so what OS would you have to use with it? I'm a Windows man really but you would need a version that would run 2 CPU's. What would be best? I hear all you guys talking about Linux being best for folding, but I have no idea where to start. Would you even run Linux with this specific board in terms of drivers etc? Give me some good input and advice, as I don't want to spend a lot of cash buying a dog of a machine . Cheers. Pete
Folding on CPU's these days is no where near as productive as on the GPU's, so you'd be better populating it with GPU's, and probably just running those. I'd use Linux myself, but there is no reason you can't run Windows - usually Pro and above allow for multi-socket machines, and then you'll be of comfortable territory.
Hi Doc. Thanks for the input. I was working on the basis that i'd use the CPU's for my Climate Modelling project and get some GPU's for folding. The wife is fed up of the study sounding like a hurricane! I figure I need a second machine for the projects and leave the PC in the study to be whisper quiet. In your opinion is the SR-2 just old tech, or would it still cut the mustard if available at the right price? Cheers. Pete
It depends how much you're paying for it. They still command a high price because they're overclockable, unlike modern Xeon systems.
Hi there. It basically means having a PC purely for the purposes of running Folding@Home (Folding@Home is a distributed computing project undertaking numerical simulations to understand protein mis-folding)
