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How much memory for folding box?

J

Joe Fission

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2006
Messages
167
First off, please forgive the relative newbieness of the request, but I'm hoping one or more of you experienced farmers can help me out.

How much memory would be good to start with in a current folding box? I was doing some searching and came up with a couple different answers, but nothing real definitive. One said 512MB was OK to start with, but I noticed some putting 1GB in some of your folding boxen. I notice the units I've been working on don't seem to use that much memory, but then when searching the forum I found reports saying that some units can use as much as 400MB. The FAQ on hardfolding.com doesn't appear to be quite up to date, and it mentions a much lower value for minimum requirements. What about dual cores? If 512MB is OK to start with for a single core system, does that mean a dual core system would be best with 1GB in order to allow for large WUs for each core (if that's even recommended)?

Any info is appreciated.
 
Minimum requirements and minimum requirements for stressful units are quite different. I'm running two instances of FAH on my duallie for a total of 45MB of memory used. But if QMDs were still around, they take 400+ MB each and all the memory bandwidth you have. I think the absolute minimum for a folding box with no pagefile at all is 96MB. Doubling the memory for dual core is a good idea just on principle, not just for FAH. I'm at 1GB and swapping on my main single processor box right now :eek:

 
If I may ask, is your main single processor box one that is not dedicated to folding?
 
It's not dedicated, correct, and I do a lot of things on it. 1GB would be more than enough for anything Folding would throw at a machine. FAH is only using 15MB or so.

 
A lot the memory needs come down to dedicated folding box or not, and which type of WU's you want to run. Bonus WU's (more points, more ram needed) or the regular WU's.

Bear min is 96 I think, 64 maybe under NT or something. (WU's use 15-30 meg)

>512 for QMD's (WU's use 400+ meg)

What was the min for 364/600 pointer gromacs? I think > 256 (WU's use 100+ meg)
 
Ya, the box(es) will be dedicated and the reason I ask is that I want to put in as much memory as will possibly be needed in the future without going too far overboard. Judging from the responses so far, 1GB sounds like a safe bet just based on the possibility of QMDs and other large WUs.
 
Normally I'd say 1 GB was an over kill, however the latest blurb on QMD's would include increased memory requirements if they come back.

Really stinks with the on board video, in the past I had "Dedicated" (read borrowed) boxen with 512 ram w/ on board showed 503 meg available to the client. 504 was the cut off.
 
The board I've decided on is mATX and has only 2 memory slots (as most mATX boards do). So I figured it easier to buy a 1GB matched set of memory now than buy half now and half later and not being able to run in dual channel mode because the halves aren't exactly matched or even buying a smaller matched set that may end up becoming too restrictive forcing me to upgrade sooner than expected. WIth the choice to use mATX, I think I may also run into the same problem of having the onboard video using system memory unless I use seperate vid cards (tho that will come later)... I'm not too worried about that at this point tho.
 
I have ~20 computers or so that are general purpose workstation that only have 256MB of RAM in them, and haven't encountered any problems. As long as you don't allow large work units, you should be absolutely fine.

 
I sorta wanted to be able to do large WUs and QMDs (if/when they return) and maybe even be set up for any other memory hungry new WUs that might be released in the future (if there are any that is), so that's why I'm aiming for lots of RAM.
 
in my dedicated folding rig (the HTPC in my sig that doesn't do HTPC-things) has a gig of ram - partially because I got it for cheap from a computer show.
 
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