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DC Vault 2

Have her visit the forums of the 80+ BOINC projects and give us the news update on all of them. I know from experience that this is very time consuming.... :)
 
Oh goodness, that's an all day chore!!
 
More good news, one of my friends that had a borged desktop years ago finally broke down and upgraded from a desktop from 2002 to a dual core laptop with capable AMD GPU. So, Jathanis guess what that means...lol. It will only be a part timer, but I may replace the desktop for her with one of them my job tosses so that her kid can play games and do homework without taking the laptop. We shall see.

Oh...and make sure to show Kai some support. He got nominated. ;)
 
Yay Nomination!! Thank you Gilthanis, I do appreciate it, and I hope you know that the card wasn't a bribe! But seriously, thank you!

Speaking of which, when I finally sell that Mac Pro, I'm going to take whats left over after I get my 3930K up and running in another box, and put it into an account for us BOINCers to use for whatever we need to DC. So, I'll let ya'll know what we have in the pot so you all can start planning what else ya'll need. This includes bills for overages and such if your ISP is being poopy. And to help with electricity bills if things add up and it gets unusually expensive.

I'll look into making it something open and allows donations and such.
 
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Interesting idea Kai. I know it wasn't a bribe, but it sounds good. LOL My power supply arrived today. I'm hoping to get a free moment to install everything this holiday weekend. I'm finishing up the 4th dual core for my friend right now and just returned the dual core laptop to my other friend.
 
Good news and bad news.

GN: I did a minimal setup of my Q8200 so that I could at least get Windows installed, updated, and testing hardware.

BN: This motherboard doesn't seem to like high end cards. The 7970 and the 650Ti will display the initial POST screen, but not move past it. However, a low end 8400GS works just fine. When I get the chance, I may look to see if there is known compatibility issues or possibly a BIOS update. The board is an Intel DX38BT. This is the one the guy sent me with a leaky capacitor and I noticed it had 2 bent CPU pins which I luckily got unbent. If things don't work out with those two faster cards, I may swap them into my i7 and then move my GT430's over to this one.
 
At least it has an OS, aside from the hardware issues, yeah??? At least there are options and it's not down completely. Let me know what you're going to do, and if you want to replace the board. There should be funds in the pot coming up on or around September 15th, not much, but there should be enough for a new mobo for ya at least.

Speaking of which, I'm going to make an email address specifically for use with a Paypal account for the pot. Yay!
 
Naw, if the board is the problem, I will just let it run the older cards and cycle some around. I'm sure I can get both of those running on the other systems I have. This Q8200 is mostly a fun mod project that I was originally gonna do out of 100% recycled parts. However, I have had to purchase a few things for it. I am mounting an LCD from a laptop into the side panel behind the motherboard to take to LAN parties and such. It will crunch BOINC when sitting at home. I don't do a lot of gaming, but figured I would show people what you could do with old systems. When I'm done, I will take pics. I'm not a master modder by any standard. I just thought it would be fun to do.
 
Have her visit the forums of the 80+ BOINC projects and give us the news update on all of them. I know from experience that this is very time consuming.... :)

Hah, I will make the suggestion, not sure what reception that will get.
 
Kai, good news. I got the 7970 working in my i7 920 rig and swapped the two GT 430's over to the Q8200 and they booted up fine. Now I just need to tinker a little more and see if I can get the 650 Ti to load in the Q8200 as well. My i7 for some reason does not like NVidia with AMD in the same rig at all. (MSI Big Bang X motherboard) I'm going to try and add a second AMD card in with the 7970 and see how that plays out, but I have to swap power supplies between the two to have the connectors I need. This should help speed up my SETI/BETA goals much quicker. :)

I still haven't seen any BETA's from WCG, but I have a feeling Friday may be the day. I'm betting they are wanting this new project to launch by the end of the month since it is cancer related and October is Cancer awareness month. All speculation, but the timing sounds about right from what was discussed in the forums. Crossing my fingers.
 
Well, my "new" Gigabyte P35-DQ6 motherboard is here to reuse all my old q9550 parts. So once I get back next week, I'll hopefully be able to add a third quad to the fun - then, as budget allows, I can add a few more video cards by Christmas or so. Here's hoping for some great Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales this year!!!

So Gilthanis, is that q8200 board a triple SLI type board? Or will you have to pull one of the GT 430's to add the 650TI?
 
Jathanis, I do not believe it supports SLI. However, SLI isn't necessary for BOINC. As a matter of history, SLI and Cross Fire don't help with BOINC. Too bad, because I would like to use it. :) However, I have read that it supports Cross Fire. It is a shame because I was going to use the 7970 with another card in it, but it wont fully post with those cards for some reason.

Good to hear you got the q9550 parts.
 
Hmm, if it won't post with anything else, it may be a power delivery problem to the slot itself. I'm glad it's up and running though, that thing is quick in SETI! Quick in anything computational actually. I guess that sometimes caps can go bad and lose the ability to properly deliver the beautiful electrical awesomeness that science requires.

I've heard great things about that Gigabyte board, it should serve you well, especially if you plan on OC'ing that thing. Jathanis, the pot should have around $400 or so by the 15th if you need something, it's open to all of us BOINCers, for whatever our needs. hard.BOINC@gmail.com is the paypal address if anyone wants to donate.
 
It is an Intel board. And yeah, I have read a lot of people liking it. I essentially got it for free since I pointed out the leaking capacitor. The problem seems to be with cards requiring a 6 pin or 8 pin power connector. 3 working cards resulted in the same POST behavior. Cards that draw their power from the board alone seem to work just fine. I will try and get more time to mess with it because I would much rather use the AMD cards in it. That 7970 is so big that I had to remove the hard drive tray from my i7 case for it to fit. I gotta say that I was highly displeased with the MSI Big Bang X board, but that is what I have. Too bad it got [H] official approval. Said so right on the box.
 
I gotta say that I was highly displeased with the MSI Big Bang X board, but that is what I have

My condolences. The only award an MSI product ever got from me when I was building, testing and repairing systems day in/day out was the "boot up the arse and don't ever come back" award :p
Sorry I can't be of more help, my historical strategy when confronted by MSI has been to give up. Saying that, I do have two MSI 7970s to go in my system, but they're complete reference design so not actually built by MSI, so I'm only concerned they won't work rather than absolutely certain of it.
Heard back regarding my case, mods are almost complete and I'm hoping to have it back within a week or so.
 
I haven't had any trouble with MSI until this board. It works, but not a $300+ military grade board works. I can only get two video cards to work at a time with it. Which is odd because the first time I ever booted it, I had 3 210's and 2 8400GS's in it. When I put the 6th card in, that is when it gave up. At one time I could get two 430's and a 210 to work. But that causes problems if I join projects that need double precision. BOINC will download the work units and then try to load them on the single precision cards and they will fail. Now it wont accept the third card. It has never allowed AMD/ATI and nVidia cards to co-exist. It also doesn't matter which slots I use nor does placement matter for getting them to show up.

Glad your case is about ready Captain. We could really use some more horse power right now.
 
That was the main issue I had with MSI products - even if they worked, they had odd issues that Gigabyte and Asus boards simply didn't have. I had one good MSI product, which was a GTX 470 Twin Frozr that clocked like a demon, actually bested some GTX 580s in the Heaven benchmark. That's the only MSI product I've owned until now due to bad experiences with their boards and graphics cards. The best I could say is that they worked some of the time, but the issues I had were enough to sour me on them for life.

I've been missing my desktop like crazy, I miss my screen (laptop won't do 1440p), my keyboard (no room for it on my desk with the laptop) and most of all the speed. I'm waiting for some money to clear before ordering my second CPU block, which I haven't bothered with because it wasn't much use without a case to put the system in, then that's finally it. Building it will be a joyous occasion :) I've been waiting long enough!
 
That's really strange behavior. I've had issues with both brands together, but only when trying to run them in Linux, Windows has always worked a treat. Weird. MSI is what MSI is. I've since switched to Gigabyte and Asus brands, they're far better built in my opinion. Funny thing is, my Asus KGPE-D16 came with a bent PIKE slot on the end, and some bent caps. But works just fine and has been running 24/7 for a few weeks now with no issues whatsoever. Weird, right?
 
We're glad to have you back soon. It is satisfying having a desktop with a nice monitor set up and a good keyboard. A laptop can never really replace the computing experience we enthusiasts crave.
 
I had to actually mod some HD trays for my Q8200. Since I used a SSD for my primary and a laptop HD for my secondary drive, there weren't any slots in the desktop case for 2.5" drives. So, I broke down two floppy disk drives and drilled a couple holes. Now they slide into the 3.5" bays just fine. :)

My last board for the Q8200 was an MSI board and it ran solid. It unfortunately took a lot of abuse too. Due to uncontrollable location at the time, it absorbed quite a bit of heat and before it finally got replaced had 7 swollen capacitors. It still runs if you are willing to fiddle with it. The only other bad experience has been a video card that had part of the slot connector chip. It was a data lane, but it still wont display or boot proper. Since I had evidently abused it physically, I didn't bother trying to RMA it.

I never had much luck with ASUS or Gigabyte. So, it kinda goes to show everyone's experiences are different.
 
Nice idea for a mod, good thinking :)

As for the boards, this was in a production environment, I used to be a system builder so we quickly got to know what worked and what didn't when we churned out 40-50+ systems a day. We had major issues with almost everything from MSI, and problems with Asrock too, across all different sockets and platforms. Not saying Asus and Gigabyte were perfect - for example, cold boot issues with earlier Gigabyte X58 boards were rife - but they were at least more consistent and we had far fewer random, odd issues.
 
Kai, bad news...I'm having issues with that card. I haven't gotten time to do extensive research on it yet, but when I came into my office last night the screen was all white and glitchy. After a reboot, I had to remove AMD Catalyst and software. It would only detect as Standard VGA monitor. After removing software, it detected again as 7900 series and began crunching. However, I can tell from work that the system is having trouble again and I'm guessing it is the card. I don't think it was from over heating, but I gotta put some monitoring software back on there. I have a box fan blowing into the case with the side pannel off. Did you have any troubles with it?
 
Hmm, that's quite odd. No, no troubles at all. It worked beautifully when I had it. Catalyst was a little glitchy and I had to restart BOINC at times, but it worked though. This is very troubling.
 
Well...I know the headaches of BOINC and AMD video cards. It did take a few reboots for everything to get setup initially, but it was working fine and then suddenly white screen just sitting there. Reboot and it loaded only as standard display and wouldn't load proper drivers. Removed AMD software. Rebooted and it still said Standard VGA. Rebooted again and it detected properly and BOINC was detecting OpenCL, which is odd if it doesn't have the Catalyst or the SDK, I'm not sure how that is working. Like I said, I will try and investigate more.
 
When I got home, it was white screen again. Rebooted and checked on it a couple hours later. White screen again. To confirm that the issue was related to the card, I pulled the card and replaced with my NVidia 650 Ti. Computer is stable again. I'm going to try and see if another system will play nice or not.
 
I'm starting to think that it was damaged in shipping. I'm sorry Gil, I feel terrible now. The thing was working great when I had it. I hope that it works in another system for ya though. If not, I'll trade ya a reference Asus 680 while I RMA it. It should have enough warranty left.

I really feel terrible Gil, but let me know what you'd like to do. I've got a single slot 650 coming as well if you want.
 
Hey, in case nobody else noticed it, it looks like EricE is back at Collatz for the [H]ard Commandos! Started ramping up last Monday, but I just noticed since I'm checking Free-DC stats from a computer instead of a phone for the first time in almost 2 weeks...

Welcome back to an original Commando! :D
 
Hey, in case nobody else noticed it, it looks like EricE is back at Collatz for the [H]ard Commandos! Started ramping up last Monday, but I just noticed since I'm checking Free-DC stats from a computer instead of a phone for the first time in almost 2 weeks...

Welcome back to an original Commando! :D

Thanks for the welcome! Trying to get my computers back up and running.

Currently have a server with a 550TI but the Intel CT NIC keeps dropping out. Have another PC that for whatever reason wont finish an install of windows.

Slowly but surely I will be turning on my devices and keeping them up. Does anyone have a push they are looking into for this month?
 
I've been running a mix of SIMAP and Docking since SIMAP only had work half the month last month and I added Docking to utilize the time. I figure by the end of the month WCG will either have BETA's for the next cancer project going or they will have BETA's and the full project ready to go. Their estimates for testing was any time now. I figured they were shooting to launch during cancer awareness month. When that project launches, I plan on hitting it pretty much full on until I hit 5 years run time.

On the GPU front, I'm just finishing up my last GPU capable project(s) goal at SETI/BETA.
 
With my Q8200 stable again and running 3 GPU's, I have added 3 more VM's to run DIMES. The downside is that the system is light on RAM. I have a ton of DDR2, but only had a single 2GB stick of DDR3 for this system. I will have to look into scrounging up 3 more 2GB sticks for it.

etothe3ric, I also forgot to mention that some of us were trying to push DIMES. We are on track at our current RAC to pass 4 teams in about a months time. We would have done it already, but we lost a lot of production recently.
 
My case is finished and will be dispatched tomorrow, finally! On the downside, the list of little things I needed to finish my build turned out to be a much longer list, and more expensive, so being as I'm still waiting on cash from something else, it'll still be a few weeks, then I just need a weekend off to build it. On the positive side though I may have a line on some better CPUs for it which would be nice.

My gf's appointment at the hospital is on Thursday so we're hoping it goes well. I have no car at the minute either to drive there, but thankfully the bus service is pretty good.

I need to clear out some more stuff, either that or cobble these random parts into a build somehow...currently drowning in random GPUs, bits of RAM, and assorted other things. I seem to be a bit of a magpie, I buy things because they might be useful or I think they're cool, and then I realise I have no use for them and just pass them on months down the line.

I am also, with any luck, picking up 7 laptops for spares/repairs, all lacking memory but I happen to have a bag of 512MB DDR2 laptop RAM to at least get them up and running with 1GB each. I'll pick up some cheap HDDs and see how they run, might be handy to distribute to family on condition that they're borged :)

On the subject of DIMES, does anyone know how to remove a system from your list of agents? My gf's SSD died and I replaced it, didn't install DIMES as the laptop was about to be replaced, but the agent from her old drive still shows because obviously I didn't deactivate or remove it, and didn't have chance to because the SSD just up and died one day. I can't see an obvious way to remove an agent from my account.
 
I haven't found a way to delete the host. However, you can reuse the dead host on a new installation. When installing a new DIMES agent, select that you have installed DIMES on that system before and scroll down to the now unused agent name. Select it and confirm. Then after finalizing the install, you can go under preferences and change the agents name to whatever you want. I just recycled 3 dead agents today. :)
 
Ah, didn't think of that. That would neaten things, although in my infinite wisdom I set the name to the model of laptop she had, but I'm sure I can just remember...
Just read the last bit of your post, whoops! Thanks for that, I'll do that later :)
 
Okay guys, opinion time - looking through the FS/FT forum, and I see a 7850 for $120 and a 560 TI for $130... I'm looking to add an inexpensive card to my daughter's rig, and figure either are upgrades from anything I'm currently running. Would I be better off with the 7850 (which seems significantly slower for dual precision than the 79XX) for projects other than Moo (the only amd project my 4850 will currently run) or the 560 to up my nvidia projects?
 
I am an nVidia fan to begin with due to less headaches. You will also find that nVidia cards are supported at all of the GPU projects where AMD is not. AMD will outperform nVidia when it comes to OpenCL or at least for the time being. As far as the Vault goes, nVidia because then you can support GPUGrid. (and more badges). Also, you have more options at PrimeGrid with nVidia. (and badges) However, you may want to look at power draw and cost of running them. I would look, but am still busy at work. :)

7850 TDP is 130w
GTX 580 TDP is 225w CUDA Cores: 512
GTX 650 TDP is 64w CUDA Cores: 384

The 580 outperforms the 650, but I don't know by how much. However, there is a significantly more power consumed. http://www.hwcompare.com/13486/geforce-gtx-580-vs-geforce-gtx-650/
The 580 and 7850 differ in different areas, so it just depends on the science. http://www.hwcompare.com/12052/geforce-gtx-580-vs-radeon-hd-7850/
7850 probably spanks the GTX 650 but again, I am just guessing. It might be worth the power draw to run two 650's. http://www.hwcompare.com/13466/geforce-gtx-650-vs-radeon-hd-7850/

I mentioned the 650 due to retail price comparison vs. the used if that matters to you. I will let you do the math on what fits your wallet and flavor ratios.

Just realized I misread the cards....doh!

560 ti vs 7850 http://www.hwcompare.com/12054/geforce-gtx-560-ti-vs-radeon-hd-7850/
560 ti TDP: 170w CUDA Cores: 384
560 ti vs 650 http://www.hwcompare.com/13488/geforce-gtx-560-ti-vs-geforce-gtx-650/

I'm guessing the 7850 would be cheaper to run and will probably outperform the 560 ti. The 560 ti just has more flexibility and probably less headaches.
 
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Got my server up and running (didn't like 2003 but liked 2012). This added a C2D E8400 and a 550TI.

Currently working on Enigma and Collatz, trying to focus just on Boinc projects for now for easy management.
 
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