Help me use my spare hardware to the max

[natermeister]

I have a couple of old Athlon X2/Opteron chips that I retired from duty in secondary machines. I'm not sure setting them up to run the SMP client is really worth the effort and expense involved. So the question is how well do these chips do feeding an nVidia GPU running GPU2?

I'm going to buy a couple 9800GTX cards with my stimulus check and I'd rather use my intel stuff to run SMP. I have the following hardware and I want to make the best use of it:

Motherboards S939: ASUS A8N32-SLI, A8R32-MVP, DFI NF4-Ultra D

Motherboards LGA775: DFI Infinity P965, Abit IP35-Pro

CPUs S939: Opteron 165, Opteron 170

CPUs LGA 775: Core 2 Duo E6700, Core 2 Quad Q6600

I also have 4GB of spare DDR2-800 and 5GB of spare DDR-400 and 500. I've also got a few spare hard drives (80 to 250GB) and lots of optical drives. What I'm missing are power supplies and cases. I'm thinking that the Antec 300 would make a good, cheap case and I'll probably scrounge some Corsair or Antec power supplies.

 

[APOLLO]

The X2 and Opteron processor will only barely make the preferred deadlines of some of the newer WUs if they are clocked on the lower end of the model range. You will definitely see far better performance and science research with a GPU2 client. I don't see a problem running these processors with the Ati or NVidia client. The NVidia client especially, doesn't even utilize the full processing power of an entire core, so that might be your best bet.

The Intel processors OTOH, will be much better to run the SMP client than the AMD hardware. If you are limited with the number of video cards to install, use them on the AMD systems with one GPU client+one standard client, and the SMP clients on the Intel systems. The C2D will run one SMP client and the quad can run one or two SMP clients. If you decide on two SMP clients for the quad in Windows, install the Affinity Changer app to improve performance.

Alternatively, if you have more than enough video cards, install them on as many systems as you can for the most science and PPD production. Hope this helps.

 

[natermeister]

So there is no reason that I couldn't get crazy 4000ppd+ production with nVidia cards on an AMD system? That would be great if that's the case, I just haven't seen anyone running high-end G80/92 cards with older AMD processors.

 

[Xilikon]

Go ahead and pick a AMD system to feed the GPU. With the 177.35 driver, you are not pegging a cpu fully so you will not have issues feeding the GPU (even 2 when a new client version add multi-GPU support). APOLLO's advice is great and I agree with him.