Hi all. I'm very excited as I have just ordered my new PC from Scan. Buying a whole new PC only happens about once every 5 years for me, so I tend to make it a good one. I have decided this time to allow Scan to build and overclock the machine, as this way I get a 3 year warranty on all the parts, and that's only costing £47 + VAT, so a bit of a bargain I think. I intend to use the machine to run Climate Models under BOINC on the CPU and FAH on my two GPU's. The spec I have gone for is:- Corsair Obsidian 550D case Corsair HX1050 PSU Gigabyte Z87-X OC Motherboards Haswell i7 4770K overclocked to 4.4Ghz Corsair Hydro H100i mounted in the roof 16 Gb of Corsair Vengeance 1866 Mhz Ram Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb SSD 2 x ASUS GTX 670 in SLi 2 Tb hard drive Windows 8 Pro. After careful consideration and some discussion on the forum, I decided to go with the GTX 670 in Sli as these seem to be the current sweetspot in term of both PPD/W and PPD/£. I'm not a great gamer, so the decision was all about folding effeciency. At approx 70,000 PPD each (or so I'm told) they certainly are quite productive, and at £150 + VAT or less they give a good bang per buck. I went for the 4770K over the 4670K because of the extra hyperthreaded cores. Running the CPU and GPUs at full pelt might give me some heat issues, but I will at least keep the study warm this winter! I'm looking forward to the machine arriving and starting to fold on it. I'll keep you posted. Cheers. Pete
Hi. Having the 2 cards set up in SLi configuration won't harm the folding efficiency will it? The motherboard supports 2 way SLi so I thought that I might as well have it set up in SLi, just in case I want to play some games, though I have an Xbox 360 for that. I can always remove the SLi if it adversely affects folding potential. Pete
There used to be issues of running Folding in SLI, but I don't think this is the case these days. It'll be easy enough to check when you get the rig running in any case.
A quick update. My new machine arrived a while ago and has been sitting in the study un-used and un-loved due to me being too busy to set it up. And Windows 8 is a right pain. I'm wishing I went for windows 7 now. Hopefully when I upgrade it to Windows 8.1 things will get back to normal and I'll actually be able to use the thing. When I get the time I will be setting up the folding program on the machine and letting it rip. In the end I went for 2 x GTX680 in SLi as they were so cheap at that time. No doubt there will be lots of new question about folding, so I'll keep you posted. Cheers. Pete
