Not that I'm planning a build or anything... I've just started "shopping" and I'm not sure what my best bet would be. I've been on both sides of the fence (current rig Intel, most rigs before that were AMD) and I'm comfortable with either one as a platform. I've still got either 2 or 4 gigs of DDR2 sitting around doing nothing, so if I could put them to good use I would prefer that, but if the jump to DDR3 just makes more sense, then so be it. As for boards, I've been looking at: AMD MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+ $135 MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 $180 ASUS M4A79T AM3 $200 Intel ASRock X58 Supercomp. $290 As I'm looking at them grouped together, I'm leaning more towards AMD But I've heard there's some new boards (such as the ASUS P6T7) coming down the pipe, and I'm not sure if I should wait for them to release before making a decision. Really looking for some advice on this, and I've seen a few of the boards in folding rigs before, so I'm hoping someone can give me a little insight as to pros/cons of any of them. Also, never used SLI of any kind before. Always seemed to be more money than necessary for comparatively little improvement. Along with that, I've recently made my way into the business world, so I have quite a bit more money to play with than I've had before.
I'm just reiterating what I have put in my rack farm OP update here (not yet posted), and I think it's more of a one off than anything, but I just got a new MSI K9A2 Platinum board at the weekend and the build quality on it is among the worst that I have ever seen. I sincerely hope that it runs stably because given the trouble that I had setting it up and getting everything onboard running properly, it would be a massive waste of my time if it didn't. I now have two of these, the first one is fine but this second one seems to have come from a bad batch or something. I can't comment on any of the other boards that you have listed, JackOfAll's thread on the ASRock supercomp board would be helpful to you though, it's in the folding forum somewhere. You may also want to look at Atlas folder's youtube video on the Foxconn Destroyer board, it looked like a great board coming out of the box and all through the build, but he couldn't get his 4x GTX295's running on it and resorted to using another K9A2 Plat. Depending on what cards you are putting in it, it may or may not be a good choice. I'll go and do some research for you and come back with a more detailled reply.
Yes, my latest K9A2 only has two memory slots that don't cause the machine to freeze, apparently randomly. Are they the same channel? - what do you think? AFAIK the MSI K9A2 and the Asrock supercomputer are the only ones on your list that are known to support the 8 GPUs of 4*GTX295 or 4*9800GX2 (which are getting quite cheap on eBay now) ~ just having the 4 PCIe x16 slots with the right spacing is not enough (don't ask me why - the answer must be a technical one, but is beyond my knowledge). Is 8 GPU something you would like to do, and are you willing to take the chance exploring new boards? How many GPUs the P6T7 will take is still a bit unclear. The Asus product page specifically mentions 3 nVidia double graphics cards and a Quattro card, but later on the page says four graphics cards. And if you enjoy wishful thinking, you could read the blurb and think you can use SLI on nVidia cards and Crossfire on ATI cards simultaneously! Again, are you willing to explore? I think that an i7 board and CPU would give good PPD if you push hard enough, 8 clients running. How much are you willing to pay for the CPU, and are you happy to overclock? Watercooling CPU and GPUs? And of course if you wait long enough, something better will come along. The little we know about the 3xx series from nVidia sounds interesting, but what it means from a folding point of view is up in the air. I imagine there may be some properties that can't be accessed without the right m'board (i.e. one that doesn't exist yet!) Personally, I am feeling poor, and have done the 8 GPUs, and so I'm waiting for the next big thing ... ... perhaps this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/larrabee_32_cores/
That's strange. I've not heard a bad word said about a K9A2 until now. I hope Uni can tell us what he thinks is below par on the build quality. It doesn't paint a pretty picture. Asus still do not appear to have mastered the P6T6 and fully populating it with graphics cards. You've got to wonder why the P6T7 hasn't yet been released. It wouldn't be too difficult to hazard a guess that getting all the PCI-E slots working with the 2x n200 chips and various graphic card combos is causing the delay. If anything, the more I think about this, I'm comfortable that the ASRock mb is 'basic' - in as much as it has no additional chips, bridges, or complications.
Thanks for all the responses so far guys, but I'll be darned if they've made my decision easier I was planning on 4 cards, be it 4 or 8 GPU's, but beyond that everything is pretty much up in the air. I was planning on staying with the Green Team, mostly because I've never been a big fan of ATI, but we'll save that discussion for another day. I was considering watercooling the board and CPU, but I can't bring myself to do the GPU's as well. I just feel the amount of money you would spend to do so is bordering on absurd, especially if the next generation of cards won't take the same block. I know the cooling benefit is massive, but I just can't justify it at this time. I never really got into O/C'ing, but it's not out of the question. I was thinking a wind tunnel-esque case and all air cooling, mostly because of the price point, but I'd have to look around for a place where my ears wouldn't suffer quite so much. I might be able to get the OK from my boss to keep it in our server room. Filtered, cooled air Cheesecake!
Somewhere I've seen a comment that the v.2 board has better quality components. I specifically asked in advance about which version my supplier had, but foolishly did not mention that in my online order - I suppose I could have returned it, but wanted to press on with the new build.
See my OP update in the rack thread for details, don't want to hijack this Saspro, I have 2 and one is fine but the other as mentioned above is a bit spongy on the build quality side of things. Seems to run fine though.
Apologies to MSI - the above is *incorrect*. With the pressure of the Chimps Challenge over, I've had time to look at this more carefully. All the slots are fine - previously I was experimenting with four 9800GX2 cards in place, 3G of memory and 32bit Windows XP. No wonder I wasn't getting sensible results
Lol I was having memory issues with a K9A2, 4gb ram and 3 x 9800GX2's while using XP x86! My problem was windows could only see 1.4gb ram even though I had 4gb in there (thread here - http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=170252) Then I realised I was being a dumbass and that XP x86 can only see 4gb ram being a 32 bit operating system but that includes the memory of the graphics cards as well so 6 x 512mb on the GX2's took away 3gb of addressing which only left enough space to windows to see 1.4gb-ish of physical ram! In your case with 4 x 9800GX2's thats your 4gb gone so windows would only see 400-512mb tops of system ram which you would hardly be able to run anything on in which case I can see why it would crash and behave funny! Stupid thing is though, since I went back to boggo XP x86 my rigs have been very very reliable, when I was using Vista x64 with dummy plugs, one of them used to lock up randomly for no reason, one used to reset its-self when it wanted!
