Hardware How To Build The Best Folding Rig

8x PCI-E slots provide more than adequate bandwidth for folding - although you will need to slice the end of the slot to allow a 16x PCI-E card to fit. It's very easy to do though - just take your time with your favourite tool (Dremel/Stanley knife), being careful not to cut into the connections in the slot or the motherboard.

 

While the article was dead on in regards to graphics card advice, it could not have missed the mark further in the motherboard area. My K9A2 is the worst board I ever owned, buggy and unpredictable even after a BIOS update.

 

I'm surprised to hear you've had problems with your K9A2, why not pop into the folding form and say hello, loads of us have K9A2's there.

 

There is absolutely no point in purchasing and using the C1060 cards for FAH. Spend your $$$'s on the latest 200 series cards. Aside from the any differences in the qualification process, as has a already been pointed out the main advantage is the additional RAM. Data transfer from system memory to card memory is a very expensive operation. If you have large datasets to process there is a big speed advantage to minimizing the number of transfers. ie. load large dataset onto the card as few times as possible. FAH does not operate on large datasets, it has been designed for the typical RAM available on consumer grade cards, and old ones at that. ie. 8 series.

You also need to bear in mind that people are using CUDA in professional or commercial datacenter applications. It's not centred on FAH or home use. Rack mounted S1070 units are going to be purchased by the investment bank to run their monte carlo simulations on option positions, not home build rigs with 4x GTX285. As a professional developer I'd expect to be using C1060's on my desktop development machine to develop the code that's going to run in production. ie. you don't develop on consumer grade hardware and then deploy to hardware with different specs. In any case, if you're writing applications that use 4GB of card RAM, you need development hardware that supports that.

Whether it's right or wrong, (or a complete waste of money if you don't need the 4GB of RAM per card), there is also the no-one ever got fired for buying IBM predicament when purchasing hardware in a commercial setting. You simply don't purchase consumer grade hardware for a mission critical application.

The professional Tesla solutions have their place in the market, but there is absolutely no point in using them in preference to a consumer grade graphics card for FAH. No real benefit for a lot of extra expense.

 

James, I've seen several reports now that with the Windows 190.38 (CUDA 2.3) drivers this 'limitation' is fixed. Various other things as well. eg. if cards are in SLI mode, you can now access the individual GPU's, which you couldn't before.

 

My K9A2 running with 2 cards on Vista 64 behaved only slightly strange. The Riva Tuner setting would not stick (be remembered) and the FAH GPU configuration was also "forgotten" making for a massive loss of points. Then I added a 3rd card, and windows now thinks I have 7 displays. Yes SEVEN. Folding has gotten worse with another card, no better. The GPUs? 9600GSOs with 96 stream processors, nothing heat or bandwidth intensive. PS? Seasonic 850.

 

I'm just the steward of the box, so I can't go cutting things up, and it a little pricey for me to want to try on It's a serious server which makes a few other things hard to deal with like power. I have not had it do much of anything for a while, but threads like this have me thinking about firing it back up for folding.

 

A much better setup would be running a i7@4ghz smp A3 core 17,000 ppd stand alone or with a couple of gtx260's. I run my shaders at 1560 average 8000ppd= 33,000 ppd

 

That is impressive.
I know it is for a good cause and all but that would cost more than most people are willing to spend.