AMD Phenom II X4 955 BlackEdition & MSI 790FX-GD70

After the ASRock Supercomputer debacle, another stop-gap solution, and a complete leap into the folding motherboard unknown, based on a couple of reviews. Original plan has gone out of the window - my brother has decided that he isn't going to buy a pair of the GTX295's, so I'm going to keep all 6 of them folding. That's decided. As it stands at the moment I have 3 PC's with 2 cards in each, which is not really what I want. I want to end up with 2 dedicated folding PC's, 4 cards in one, 2 in the other. So..... I'm going to put 4 of the cards back into a single mb and water cool them all. Due to the lack of choice with Core i7, (at least until Asus actually release the P6T7), I've decided to go AMD with a Phenom II X4 955 BlackEdition and MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard. K9A2 might have been the 'safer' choice, but a couple of postings regarding the quality of this board have put me off buying it and with the AM3 board I can use the DDR3 I already have.

Doing something silly with a pair of 5500 Xeons and the Supermicro X8DTH, (with 7 PCI-E slots), series motherboard might have been an option, but for the fact that I can't find anyone in Europe with stock of the motherboard.

I want a single 1500W power supply with 4x PCI-E 8 pin and 4x PCI-E 6 pin. The 1500W Thermaltake has a couple of dodgy reviews due to heat build-up and the other candidate, the Silverstone Strider ST1500, is not actually available in the retail channel yet. Suggestions? I suppose if all else fails, I could order a new rear panel for the Mountain Mods case with 2 PS cut-outs, but I'd rather try and find a single, decent, 1500W power supply. Thoughts?

 

CPC's folding article said that 4 GTX295's drew >1000w so I think you'd be alright with an Enermax 1250W. Which has a peak load of 1500w anyway. If you can stomach the cost, it should keep all four 295's very happy. And no doubt cope with throwing in a Linux SMP to boot

 

When I got bored fixing a downed rig at the weekend I experimented with using the Enermax 1250w to run 4 x 295s and 2 x VMs in a case for 24 hours. The rig maxed out at 1140w from the wall (with 511 pointers) and the PSU did not flinch at all.

Will maybe post a bit more on the experience tomorrow if I get some time.

 

I would be happy enough to use a 1200W supply on that sort of rig. The FSP Everest pro's are rock solid in my experience, and don't cost the earth considering you get 85% Efficiency and lots of rails.

 

phoenicis, please do post more. And thank you everyone for your opinion.

OK, reason I spec'd a 1500W supply rather than 1250W...... I concur with you guys, GTX295 folding - somewhere between 200-250W per card depending on WU. (This is totally unscientific - based on guesstimation and a plug-in watt meter. What I should have done, is remove one of the GTX295's and note the power drop, just for one card.)

Anyway, don't forget I intend to water cool and overclock these cards. So far I'm rock solid stable with the two cards that I already have water cooled @ 720/1548/1080, which is quite a bump from the defaults. Guessing again - I'd reckon that's probably adding 50W to each card. So let's say, each card could pull a max of 300W, so 4x300W=1200W. No margin there. Especially as it's not just the CPU and a single hard disk to add to the equation. A couple of 18W pumps, 12 fans on the radiators - lets say I need 100W for ancillaries, plus the CPU, which I'd intended to overclock. Thinking out loud - 1500W starts to look like not enough! Perhaps the single power supply plan is doomed from the start.

 

What about 1 or 2 5.25" drive bay psu boosters? Dont know how good they are, but CPC review some ages ago. Then you maybe able to get away with the 1250w psu . Not had any experience with these Jack but just thought id throw an idea into the mix anyway.

 

I'm running the 1500w thermaltake with no problems.
I almost looked at the drivebay boosters etc but that gets expensive.

 

Saspro, how hard do you reckon you're running it? I'm concerned after reading this....

That doesn't bode so well for running it at close to its rated capacity.

I wasn't even aware these drive bay booster power supply things existed. Not a very clean solution though. It would probably be cheaper to get a new back panel for the Mountain Mods case and use 2 power supplies, on the basis that I already have a spare 850W.

 

Talk about throw a spanner in the works. I just heard back that the Asus P6T7 is going to available to buy 2nd week of June. Do I wait? That's the question.

Also, a quick search on those drive bay GPU power supplies has turned up the Thermaltake Toughpower Power Express 650W, a 2 drive bay solution. It's available for less than 60 quid, the 650W would power a pair of GTX295's, and I could use an existing 850W or 1200W as the main PSU. Maybe not such a bad idea after all.

 

You were wondering what the power draw was for the GTX295. Check out atlasfolder http://atlasfolding.com/?paged=3 as he has a chart showing the power draw as he starts each of the nodes up.

He has a fairly large number of 295s and has recently added some 9800Gx2 GPUs.

Have a read of his post over at http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=931366#931366 where he gives some good information about managing multiple GPU clients.

 

Wow 650w for £60 is pretty tempting. It seems they have really improved over the last year or two. They wouldnt be bad paired with a decent 650-850w psu.
Think i will keep them in mind for my next folding rig.

 

Thank you. That's helpful. 1124W (from the wall) for 8 GPU's plus a single SMP client. But that's without the extra watts of a CPU overclock and before he started overclocking the GPU's. So you've got to figure on another 200-300W. I think the 650W 2 drive bay solution to power a pair of cards and me shunting around some hardware to free up a 1200W power supply for the rest, is the way forward. I'd rather have too much capacity than too little.

 

I understand that thermaltake manufacture one of the only 1500W PSU's on the market, but as the bit-tech review says, it's not built solidly enough or with highly enough rated components to survive the stresses that you are going to be putting on it with folding. Add your overclocks on the 295's, the pumps, fand and hard drive into the equation and you do need not only a 1500W supply, but a rock solid one.

Incidentally for any of those CPC members that haven't realized it just yet (it's more evident in the project logs section), thermaltake products are generally looked down upon here in the bit-tech community for their lack of build quality or functionality Just a heads up!

 

Agreed. I think the way forward for me is 2 power supplies. (That's my conclusion for the moment.) Still, the Silverstone Strider ST1500 does look really interesting. On paper, it's silver certified, and spec'd 1500W continuous power output with 40°C operating temperature. Need CPC to review it - favourably, of course and for it to actually be available to buy!

Especially their water cooling gear! Chuckle.

 

I've had an OC'd QX9650 & 3x GTX280's running on it and it seemed fine. THis was only for a few weeks though (before I had to send the hardware to it's final location)

The bit-tech community can go **** itself then. The watercooling is shite but they've got a few good bits.
Especially at this supercomputer uses the PSU's.

 

1000W worth, maybe?

Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

 

lol!

I agree, some of their stuff is ok, but seriously, their cooelrs (air and water) are just shocking

 

I've read the manual (downloaded from Asus) - it's not promising.

 

Don't tease. What makes you say that?

 

Sorry, didn't mean to tease. The manual repeats that one Quadro graphics card and three Tesla cards provides the "optimum multi purpose computing performance". Also describes the setup for triple-SLI, but nothing more.