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Best CPU/GPU combo for folding @ home?

Doozer

Doozer

2[H]4U
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May 30, 2001
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Recently my Mother passed from cancer and I'll be getting some money from her estate.
I want to build a box for her to help with the battle with cancer.

What hardware should I be looking for?
 
GPU-wise, you will want to go nVidia but I would hold off for the next Gen series. Ryzen processors are probably the better bet as well.
 
For F@H, GPU performance crushes CPU performance. Last month i build a new PC and the RTX 2070 super can do 1.8 - 2.3M PPD depending on the work units.
The AMD 3900X @ 4.2 all cores does an est 250K PPD.
If it will be a dedicated folder, see if you can pick up a mother board that can handle multiple video cards like one of those mining boards with a good large PS, that would be one way to go. Save money by going with a small CPU, just needs to be able to handle the multiple video cards.

Sorry to hear about your moms passing.
 
Since this COVID thing hit, I've purchased several used 1060's and 1070's off of eBay for pretty reasonable prices.
There are also good deals on open air mining racks and PCIe risers if you want to go that route.
Otherwise, look for any cheap case with good ventilation, a good power supply, and a CPU with 1 thread per GPU.
I personally prefer Linux for dedicated folding rigs for cost and slight performance gains.
I have a step by step guide I wrote for installing and configuring Linux and F@H if you want to look at it.
 
Sorry to hear of this sad news. We can only look into the future, understand the present and learn from the past.

Anyway, there are two popular sites often quoted about GPU performance in FAH:
At overclock.net and at the official folding forum. You should be able to find most of the information about GPU performance in their spreadsheets.

Beside hardware, if I run FAH, linux gives extra PPD. Just FYI. As others have said folding with CPU is not as efficient as GPU.
 
All of my main folding boxes are on Linux. Even in my windows install i run a linux vm for the additional ppd and reduced time spent on work units.

If only windows performed like linux.
 
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Remember that F@h uses Quick Return Bonus. So one fast GPU is better than two slower ones, even if the slower ones sum to roughly the same (or a little higher) compute performance. I have all 1xxx cards, however 2xxx provide a nice boost. I'm waiting for the next gen of cards before I buy anything new though.
 
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Personally I'm in a wait and see mode. With Ampere just around the corner and the Threadripper Pros due to see the light shortly, I'd wait a month. Nothing wrong with starting some research and questions though as I'm going to watch this thread too.

Although I'm looking for stuff for use outside of just F@H.
 
Doozer, get a RTX 3070/3080 for your new build or better still 3090 if you have plenty of cash to spare from the estate. ;)

Looking at RTX2080 Ti with 4352 cuda cores, FAH PPD is roughly 2M+ give or take. A 3080 with 8704 cuda cores should give you about ____PPD [fill in the blanks]. We are probably looking at 4M-5M PPD or more conservatively as the PPD does not scale linearly with the TPF time.

1599002199610.png


TPF set to 30 sec
1599002705117.png


TPF set to 60 sec.

1599002759168.png
 
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