Cheapie folders?

H

heavyharmonies

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Jun 16, 2004
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Am thinking about throwing a few more boxes at folding. What's the best bet for a sub-$200 box for folding?

I see IBM Intellistation M Pros on Ebay for $150-200 all the time. They're usually 667 or 733 PIIIs (dual capable) with 256-512MB RAM, 18GB SCSI drives. One of those plus $20-40 for a second CPU?

Or would a Celery 1.4 be a better folder? AMD?

What do you think has the best bang for the buck for a throwaway PC?

Thanks,

-Dan
 
You can do better than that.
These are rough prices.
Mobo $40. On board vid and lan.
Cpu $60. About 2Ghz.
Mem $25. 128 Meg.
HDD $50. Cheaper if pos.
PSU $25. Not the cheapest.

Total $200.
For a 2 Gig AMD with 128 meg of memory.
Throw Win98 on it and put it in a blade and it will fold fast.

If you can find somewhere which sells the older 4-10 Gig hard drives cheap then grab them as they are ideal for use in a folding box.
If you save money on the hard drives then get more memory.

Luck........ :D
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Good prices on cheap deals can usually be found on pricewatch, mwave, newegg and maybe tiger direct..

JonasSteele
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504 Points and Climing
 
www.compgeeks.com

build yourself some systems there. i can build a set of 5 boxen (a bunch of 1.5 p4's) with mobo, psu, cpu, 256 ram, nic, and a 40gig disk in one to net boot the rest off of for about $1200. that includes a 16-port switch and cabling. get yourself 7.5ghz goin' on. you can do better on the price if you switch to the amd side of things and get a duron 1.6 or so + cooler. cases are overrated for folding boxen:D make yourself a rack the mobos slide into and then the lan cables plug in. tell them to boot off the lan, then set up the one box and get it to boot the other 4 (plus whatever boxen you add later with the same config - this is important)

the 40gig disk is overkill, too. a 15gig would be more than enough.

and the only reason i haven't done this is i don't have $1200 lying around. (i wish i did, though)

good luck.

edit: of course, there's always these
that would work too (and it's at a better price point than the ebay systems apparently) you would need to add lan still, but that's only $4 or something.

u_rogue_jedi.gif
 
You can build a decent Duron 1.8Ghz at Newegg w/256MB RAM for ~$200, and that will kick the PIII 933 all over the place. eBay some used hard drives and you're in business. You can usually pick up a LOT of 6-8 drives some people have accumulated through various upgrades and such for ~$10/drive. 2 GB is plenty enough for a folding box.

Check out this eBay auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=39971&item=5110600808&rd=1

With shipping and buy it now pricing, it's $45, which works out to $4.50 per drive, not bad for being able to get drives for 10 boxen.
 
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I just went over to the egg and priced up what an AMD blade would cost and it came to $214 including shipping. This is what I chose for components:

PCChips M863 mobo, SiS 741 chipset w/integrated vid & lan
Retail Tbred XP2000
256 MG Vdata PC2700 DDR
Fortron 300 watt psu
40 gig Maxtor hard drive

You could save a bit of money if you can find some old hard drives for cheap too. Anything from 2 gig on up is plenty for a dedicated folding blade.
 
256Mb memory is kinda overkill for a dedicated folding box. And that Xp2000 doesn't need PC2700 memory either. PC2100 would do just fine, if you're not overclocking it. If you go with 128MB of Corsair Value Select, it'd save you $8.

Doing that would allow you to put in an XP 2200, and only pay $1 more. Total $215
 
nice finds.

also you don't really have to spend anything on hard drive (well expect one 4 gig or so)... you could setup a 'trimed' down install of Slackware Linux (FreeBSD might also work) and then just netboot the other boxen... so you save:

(P*N)-P where P = Price and N = Number of Boxen
and W*N where W = Windows Licenses :D
 
Good points all around. I especially like Bill Clo's trick of trading down to PC2100 to get a faster CPU! :D

Have a look at the diskless Linux if you want, but do check out the onboard NIC thoroughly first. The NVIDIA all-in-one boards typically are problematic, because NVIDIA won't/can't provide source code for their Linux drivers. It can be solvable, but may cause some hair-pulling frustration before you get it right. I bought four NForce2 all-in-one boards thinking I could go diskless but gave up after fighting with the network drivers. Things may have improved in the six months since I tried to go diskless, so its worth checking out. Just know before you buy whether it will be trivial or not to go diskless.
 
rogue_jedi said:
www.compgeeks.com

build yourself some systems there. i can build a set of 5 boxen (a bunch of 1.5 p4's) with mobo, psu, cpu, 256 ram, nic, and a 40gig disk in one to net boot the rest off of for about $1200. that includes a 16-port switch and cabling. get yourself 7.5ghz goin' on. you can do better on the price if you switch to the amd side of things and get a duron 1.6 or so + cooler.
Click to expand...

But for about that same price you could do one dual 3.06 xeon system, and save the space/networking issues.

just my $0.02usd
 
TekieB: the only problem with doing that is you only really get 2 cpus that way (HT sucks at folding) and the 5 1.6durons (if you go that route) will beat the crap out of the xeon system when it comes to folding. it's also scalable (as many as you want.... w00t)

with netboot: compgeeks has a $10 10/100 lan card that does PXE net boot (the most common/best lan boot protocol) and it's a 3com so linux has drivers. if you get the little cable, you can even turn them on over lan using the card. the only issue is that you then need more memory because you'd have to set up a ramdisk. anyway.
 
Is there any cheap dual or quad boards out there? You can get AMD MPs "fairly" cheap (or just mod some XPs)... do celron's run in SMP mode?

My thinking, is that if you could find a cheap dual mobo, you could save on ram, power supply, etc

Just saying, in my mind, a Dual say 1.0 ghz is better then then two 1.0 ghz.... less maintaince, less hardware that can fail, etc If they could be bought at the same or near same price I would go that route.
 
The best dual AMD board is the MSI K7D-Master.
If you go that route then your better getting a pair of 2400+'s and modding then to mp's.
That should give you 4 to 4.2 Ghz per box depending on fsb.
How do you think I get 20+ Ghz from 5 boxen.

Luck......... :D
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Bill Clo said:
256Mb memory is kinda overkill for a dedicated folding box. And that Xp2000 doesn't need PC2700 memory either. PC2100 would do just fine, if you're not overclocking it. If you go with 128MB of Corsair Value Select, it'd save you $8.

Doing that would allow you to put in an XP 2200, and only pay $1 more. Total $215
Click to expand...

That XP2000 is a Tbred model which uses a 12.5 multi, which allows you to set that sucker on a 166 fsb for 2075 MHz, which is a fairly decent overclock and probably won't require bumping up vcore much, if at all. In all, it will give you a better and easier overclock than trying to get 166 X 13 out of the 2200. Also, I chose 256 MB ram as it seems that more and more of the Gromacs wu's being served out nowdays are requiring more memory usage and gives you a little headroom in case their memory footprint grows even more than now. Plus, that PC2700 memory was the cheapest 256 MB stick of ddr that the egg had also. :D
 
muddocktor said:
That XP2000 is a Tbred model which uses a 12.5 multi, which allows you to set that sucker on a 166 fsb for 2075 MHz, which is a fairly decent overclock and probably won't require bumping up vcore much, if at all. In all, it will give you a better and easier overclock than trying to get 166 X 13 out of the 2200. Also, I chose 256 MB ram as it seems that more and more of the Gromacs wu's being served out nowdays are requiring more memory usage and gives you a little headroom in case their memory footprint grows even more than now. Plus, that PC2700 memory was the cheapest 256 MB stick of ddr that the egg had also. :D
Click to expand...

Well since you put it that way, your choices make more sense now. Cool. Go for it. :)
 
What about someone making an ultra lite distro of nix that could be booted of a 32 or 64mb cf card? Like the lil ITX boards do.
 
TekieB said:
What about someone making an ultra lite distro of nix that could be booted of a 32 or 64mb cf card? Like the lil ITX boards do.
Click to expand...
There is a section over on the Electron Microscope Download page titled FAH on a Pen Drive (8 MB or larger). That may be what you're looking for. It says ask Turmelle for help, but we haven't seen that guy around here in months. So your mileage may vary.

Another folder, Arkaine, also has a distro of linux floating around that is tailored for FAH.


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