BigAdv with Opteron 8300/8400 chips.

also i forgot to mention that with the SM boards (H8QME-2/+) for the sockets that are close together, you'll probably have to angle the hyper 212's to fit, this is somewhere in the guides section to for the 4p rigs. please see this post for reference: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038178435&postcount=28

or hopefully the musky mount for 212's will work with F
 
Qinsp said:
The system that log is from:

2U Supermicro supercase. 2 PSU's, 8 high speed fans, AMD HD6570 GPU, 64gb HDD, 16gb of DDR2-800, DVD drive.

250w at idle.
430w with one PSU plugged in and folding with Kraken.
455w with both PSU's plugged in.

A naked system will draw less power. IIRC, it's about 355w? folding naked with SSD. 100w overhead from fans, GPU, DVD, second PSU.
Click to expand...

Just want to say hello to everyone, been following you guides for many years, thanks.

Hi Qinsp, I was wondering what you use, and if you use a Kill a Watt meter to get the watt reading.
I have a H8QME-2 with 4 8425 hex core, 4-80mm fans on the heatsinks that came with it.
Folding naked with 3, 120mm fans blowing over it. 1 SSD and No cd/dvd.
With the Kill a Watt I was reading 390-400 watts 122 volts and well over 3 amps.
After Burner said his was running at 315 amps or so, reading from a backup power unit.
So I knew something is not right.
I have a 6 gang extension I had cut and put in a dimmer switch for my reptiles heat pad.
I removed the dimmer switch, and did a reading with my amp probe that I know is good.
I did heating/ a/c and worked in a electric motor, generator shop. I am good with electric.
My amp probe was reading 122v at 2.5 amp bouncing to 2.6 amps
Volts X amp = watts 2.6 x 122 = 317 watts that means my Kill a Watt is off by 77 watts.
To me that is a lot. That is 25% off.

Just some food for thought.
Thanks again.
Bill
 
hello bill, i recognize your name from the folding@evga forums.

question; what power supply are you using? if it is horribly inefficient, that could be causing your system to be using more watts than it needs to.

also, where did you take the amp probe reading from?
 
Bill1024 said:
Just want to say hello to everyone, been following you guides for many years, thanks.

Hi Qinsp, I was wondering what you use, and if you use a Kill a Watt meter to get the watt reading.
I have a H8QME-2 with 4 8425 hex core, 4-80mm fans on the heatsinks that came with it.
Folding naked with 3, 120mm fans blowing over it. 1 SSD and No cd/dvd.
With the Kill a Watt I was reading 390-400 watts 122 volts and well over 3 amps.
After Burner said his was running at 315 amps or so, reading from a backup power unit.
So I knew something is not right.
I have a 6 gang extension I had cut and put in a dimmer switch for my reptiles heat pad.
I removed the dimmer switch, and did a reading with my amp probe that I know is good.
I did heating/ a/c and worked in a electric motor, generator shop. I am good with electric.
My amp probe was reading 122v at 2.5 amp bouncing to 2.6 amps
Volts X amp = watts 2.6 x 122 = 317 watts that means my Kill a Watt is off by 77 watts.
To me that is a lot. That is 25% off.

Just some food for thought.
Thanks again.
Bill
Click to expand...

Yup, Kill-a-Watt. But no monitor, just the system.

Somebody correct me, but with AC current, Volts x Amps is VA, not watts. This is because the voltage you read is peak, but the true volts are a sin wave.

When I did it naked it was using a Silver rated $300 gaming PSU, and just a SSD plugged into it, and everything that wasn't necessary in the BIOS turned off, like COM ports, etc.
 
I found this, as I thought, we are talking resistive loads with power supplies right?
Inductive is more like a motor where we used power factors in the formula.

How to convert VA to Watts and KVA to Kilowatts

Basics

Since watts is volts times amps, what is VA? VA (or volt-amps) is also volts times amps, the concept however has been extended to AC power. For DC current
VA = Watts (DC current).

In AC if the volts and amps are in phase (for example a resistive load) then the equation is also

VA=Watts (resistive load)

http://www.powerstream.com/VA-Watts.htm

How would the Kill a watt know if it is a inductive load or a resistive load? And when to use the power factor?
 
Hi Ted I am using a NZXT 700w gold.
I think my power is ok
4 x 55 w cpu at most is 220w a few sticks of memory at 1.5 watts each 25w a few fans and the PSU can't use another 200w like the kill a watt says.
When I added 8 sticks it went up 5 watts as per the K A W meter
 
Last edited:
the 8425's are rated at 55w for average use, 79w TDP, so that may be throwing your calculations off. so if the cpu's were doing "normal" work and requests, they would average to 55w, but since you are F@H'ing, they are at 100% all the time. so 79 (which isn't even the max wattage, it can actually go over that, maybe even to 90) so 79w * 4 = 316w, that already accounts for at least 96w that you weren't accounting for.

check the cpu-world link here;http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/AMD-Six-Core Opteron 8425 HE - OS8425PDS6DGN.html
 
My amp probe was at 2.6 the kill a watt was 3.4. an amp is an amp.
even so say 317kv x 90pf = 285 kw 90% PSU but I believe it is resistive still. Even if not
Even less than my original v x a = w of 317

I am going to test some motors and other resistive loads and see.
I will let you know what I find.

PS. I took the amp reading on the 120V hot wire feeding just the PSU. after the plug in to the kill a watt
 
just wanted to make sure you saw my post above, scroll up if you missed it
 
Even thou fah is at 100% it is not the tax on it like prime95 at 100%
The cpu gets a lot hotter and the amps go up under prime 95.
That in itself is strange, both being at 100% load.

AB watt usage on a power backup made for computers is not the same as the kill a watt said it was (390w). It was as my calculation, 317W
His is the same as my computer and all these in this thread.

We will get to the bottom of this.
I been a bit busy, but I will test motors (inductive), electric heaters (resistive) hair drier that should have both loads. With both KAW and amp probe.
 
Last edited:
Bill1024 said:
Even thou fah is at 100% it is not the tax on it like prime95 at 100%
The cpu gets a lot hotter and the amps go up under prime 95.
That in itself is strange, both being at 100% load.
Click to expand...

i think prime95 uses a lot more memory, so the memory controller could be the culprit. this is just speculation though.
 
ok so far, I tested an oil burner motor I have here with the blower wheel on it.
Running in the open air, with my amp probe it was at 1.8 amps
I plugged it into the KAW meter it said amps were 2.2
With a 700 deg heat gun my amp probe had it at 4.86 - 8.55 low high setting.
Plugged into the KAW it was 6.96 - 9.6

Looks to me like the KAW is around an amp off and to two amps on the one heat gun setting.
If one part of the formula is off than the reading cant be trusted.

Only 2 things are possible, AfterBurners power backup and my amp probe are both off and KAW is correct. Or KAW is right and we both are wrong.
I will early in the week, go to the motor shop I used to work at and bring my amp probe and the KAW and do some bench testing.
If they let me. I am pretty sure they will.
I will report back.

Bottom line, take the KAW reading with a grain of salt. AT least for now.

Thanks again H and Q for the folding and info.
If I can be of any help. Please let me know.
 
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Oh yeah, I do fold for two teams, EVGA and a team I started with close to 8 years ago. The folding wolves.
They used to be Team Abit years ago. Before Abit stopped making motherboards.
So many good teams and people out there folding.
It's just too bad electricity is so damn expensive.
Thanks again.
Bill
 
Yup, Kill-a-Watt can be off by a bit.

Keep this in mind though.

I have both a dual Xeon hexacore at 3.0ghz (X5650 mild overclock) and a 2U dual PSU 24 core x 2.1ghz Opteron sitting next to each other. Using the same Kill-a-Watt the dual Xeon is 515w.

The Opteron makes more PPD though on every BigAdv job. It doesn't break a sweat either. Temps are way cold while folding, so I doubt it's under max load.
 
i now have an extra bios chip for SuperMicro H8QME-2/+ if anyone is in NEED (as in, i'd like to keep it for emergencies, but if someone needs it, i'll send it to you)

pm me if you need a chip due to borked update or something
 
I followed your directions and my bios flashed worked fine. My 8386's are folding their first 8104.:D
 
penn7 said:
I followed your directions and my bios flashed worked fine. My 8386's are folding their first 8104.:D
Click to expand...

congrats! what are your temps like? i'm having a heck of a time trying to keep mine cool nekkid with passive copper and fans stacked on top of them!

[in case you don't know how to get the temperature readouts]
follow this guide here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1669698
just do the part starting with "Packages" and stop when you get to "Configuration"

then run "sudo tpc -temp" from a terminal, put in your password, and you'll have your temps
[/in case you don't know how to get the temperature readouts]
Click to expand...
 
Thanks to both of you and Qinsp for all the good info. haven't checked the temps yet. at work right now. temp's were tonight's project.
 
You will know if it gets hot, the board will start screaming at you. (on board alarm)
Mine did that the day before yesterday, it was almost 90f in the server room.
 
mine is in my shop in the basement, normally the room stays around 70-75 in summer, 60 in winter. we'll see how fast it goes up now. no screams yet, but I've got 5 120's blowing down. If it gets to hot I'll start looking for better coolers.
 
yeah, if you don't have the board beeping at you, you know you are under 72c (if you didn't change the setting in the bios) so there's that.

i actually had to raise that setting to 85 until my hyper 212's arrive Tuesday ($9/ea here)

thems should get the temps under control.
 
tpc installed, three at 51 :D one at 67:(

are the nodes numbered in the same order as the cpu sockets?
 
I believe they correspond, at least when tpc told me node 2 was running hot, I added a fan to CPU 3 and it lowered the temp of node2. So tpc starts at 0and the board starts at 1, seems to correlate from there
 
thanks, Must of had a slow one in the mix, moved it to the northbridge. temps are even now. topping out right now at 53.
 
so i couldn't wait and installed a hyper 212 i had currently onto my board that has the 8386's, see if you can tell me which cpu has the 212 on it:

YS2lqJr.png


keep in mind these are 137w TDP cpus. would keep the 6 core 115w TDP cpus nice and cold.
 
nice! But right now mine is topping out at 54. I'll wait and see, don't have any 6 cores to worry about.
 
Thats nice to see bigted. I got 4 of those right after you posted, looks like there outta stock now.

What are you using fan wise?
 
BLACK@BLUE said:
Thats nice to see bigted. I got 4 of those right after you posted, looks like there outta stock now.

What are you using fan wise?
Click to expand...

using the fan that came with it.

on the other cpus right now i have 1u copper bricks, on 2 cpus that are close to each other, i have 2 120mm fans stacked on top of each other, and on cpu4 i have 3 120mm fans stack on top (this is the cpu that runs the hottest)
 
Didn't think of that, ill play with it a little tonight
 
I don't like going over 55°C with the 8300/8400's. That's when the factory protection starts to kick in.
 
Whatever "protection" is there, it is part of the board (hence may vary from model to model
and may be configurable, too), not CPUs.

HTC features, while present, are not vouched by AMD to be functional on any Family 10h
Socket F CPU. That includes 8300 and 8400 series. No Socket F boards should enable
on-chip HTC and I am yet to see one that does :)

To check "protection" status, run:
Code: 
sudo tpc -htc | grep HTC.features.enabled

This is from dual 2400 series machine:
Code: 
$ sudo tpc -htc | grep HTC.features.enabled
HTC features enabled flag: false. Hardware Thermal Control is [b]disabled[/b].
HTC features enabled flag: false. Hardware Thermal Control is [b]disabled[/b].
$
 
Note: on the SM boards, the fans kick to HIGH at 55°C and don't slow until 52°C.
Keeping it under 55°C seems to save power.
 
bigted said:
so i couldn't wait and installed a hyper 212 i had currently onto my board that has the 8386's, see if you can tell me which cpu has the 212 on it:

YS2lqJr.png


keep in mind these are 137w TDP cpus. would keep the 6 core 115w TDP cpus nice and cold.
Click to expand...

update, got all 4 212's fitted to the H8QME-2+ board, and would like to report they do fit, albeit they are angled because of the socket position, will update with pics probably tomorrow night.

in a 55F room, here are the temps in C:

MTjx4Dj.png


like i said, i'll update with pics probably tomorrow night.
 
still no pics. I'm interested because the days are getting hotter, and so is my shop.
 
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