Im now folding, and I want more PCs

B

bob

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 13, 2002
Messages
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Well, I now have 2 3000+ amd rigs folding, giving my airconditioner a healthy workout. I started folding under the name 'bob' but I noticed some tardbreath already used my name, so Im now using [H]Bob. Of course im folding for the team, and I seem to have this urge to buy more boxen.

Ive been kicking around the idea of getting a mobile rackmount closet, to stuff some more PCs in to learn more about networking and linux, and to try out a cluster.

I have room for ~10 mid-atx cases. Im not sure yet if the rackmount cabinent will be airconditioned or not, that will take up a significant amount of space, weight and power in a mobile cabinent (I have an 8k BTU AC unit sitting in my car, ive had it for years...).

Since Im a full-time college student on a fairly tight budget, I cant jump up and start buying new boxen. Id like to know exactly what configuration would be best (well aside from the obvious). The best $$/Mhz/watt ratio, I suppose. I have the cash to buy 10 'new' PCs from dell, I just would rather not spend money left and right.

Im just trying to think, but wall outlets are ~20 amps. One here is 40 amps, but its outside and it runs my 2HP air compressor. so I have about 2 amps per pc to work with, or 240W. The airconditioning unit pulls, I think... 9 amps. Its an older 8,000 BTU unit, using R22 as a refridgerant.

so I should assume 10A to work with, 120W per pc. 8000btu = about 2300W. So I can move close to 230W of heat output per pc. Ehh, forget all that. Probably wont ever be used.

Anyways, Id like to get 10 PCs. What would you guys reccomend?
 
I made a little guide here that might help you with general hardware choices.... a bunch of people have helped me with recommendations over the last few months..... might be a good place to start if you're looking to buy and build a farm.... It'll at least give you an idea of the costs for each platform....


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
Do you pay your electricity bill? The decision on what to buy is very dependent on this question.

If you do, I would personnaly go with some variant of a dual-core solution, or if you can afford it, a mobile solution.

Pentium-Ms fold gromacs well (used to die on tinkers and probably still do).
Turion with a cheap 754 board would be a pretty good solution from a price/performance/Cost ratio) but you would have to do your research to get the right mobo and heatsink for this combo. X2 or Opty dual core would be a simple and good solution for price/performance/cost but will have a higher startup cost (make back the difference in less than a year from electricity bills). I will leave other Intel suggestions to people that have more familiarity.

Better questions are:
1. how much money do you currently have to spend
2. Do you pay your electricty bill
3. Do you want to fold naked
4. How familiar are you with Linux


All those questions will help for us to answer :)
 
Hito Bahadur said:
Do you pay your electricity bill? The decision on what to buy is very dependent on this question.
Click to expand...

Not quite sure yet, Im moving fairly soon. Some apartments dont charge for utilities (but dont allow A/C and have the heat pre-set), some charge you... Either way, It should be around 750KwH/mo for 1kW of power-suckage. ~8c KwH I think. So In the range of 60-70 a month.

Its affordable.

Oh and as for the questions.
1. Earing ~650/mo, most of that gets stored in my bank account. Id rather not spend more than ~400 on this right now.
2. Yes and no. Not right now, maybe when I change apartments.
3. As long as it can fit in some kind of rackmount-ish cabinent, yes.
4. Mostly with setting up routing in freesco. Good enough to do some things, but not enough to get me real far without a how-to guide.

I mainly want the boxen for messin around with till I find a real use for them, but for now folding for the horde is a good excuse.
 
I like my new boxen.
They are based on the MSI K8NGM2 MoBo & 4200's.
Add 2 gig memory, SI120 Heatsink, Hiper 400 watts PSU.
Add a 10% overclock.
They pull 145 watts for a nice 4.8 Ghz folding power.
Thats 30 watts per Ghz.
Cost around £700 new.

My 2400+ MP's pull 180 watts for only 4 Ghz folding power.
Thats 45 watts per Ghz.
Plus no SSE2 boost so they fold around 15% slower than the X2's.
Cost around £700 new.

My Opteron's 250 pull 360 watts for 4.8 Ghz power..... :eek:
That 75 watts per Ghz.
But that boxen has 8 Gig mem, 4 raptors, 6800 vid card, etc, etc.
Cost a silly amount....... :D

Just some numbers on power usage.

Luck.......... :D
 
im looking around on that comparison chart, I remember seeing that once a long time ago. Thanks to whomever took the time to make that :cool:.

Im getting concerned about keeping the temps down. It got up to 95F yesderday (about 34C for the metric folk) in here yesterday. Thats with one old-school kenwood amplifier, 2 Pcs and some various other crap like a router, wifi bridge etc running :eek:.

Anyways, Im drawing up some plans. Ill update here later once I get everything figrued out, some [H]ard-core folders (or people with money to burn) might like my idea for a cabinet.

Ill keep lurking in the for sale/hot-deals subforum of hardforum.
 
I've had upwards of 10-14 boxes running in my house and a variety of units.

I'm personally retiring a couple of systems and going with an Opty 165 and a mobo with IGP:

Opteron 165 (gives you 2x1.8Ghz for folding....i,e, can run 2 instances with no significant slow down in performance for folding)
Asus a8n-vm csm 939 mobo (more research, I might go with a mobo with the ability to under-volt or have a higher range for FSB)

(I bought the 2 components above from Monarch for for $361 shipped yesterday)

From a power standpoint, having an integrated Graphics solutions is much better.

I'm assuming you are predominately using these as primarily folders....

I would plan for 512MB of memory, minimum, per instance of FAH. Dedicated folding X2 should have 1GB memory IMO. If you are also gaming on the system you should have at least another 512MB.

Consider a 2.5in HDD. If you have to buy a HDD then the power savings is worth it in the long run and size of the hdd is not significant. A 10-40 GB 2.5in HDD should be fairly inexpensive.

Size your PSU appropriately (no reason for more than a 350 watt PSU for such a system, but would recommend a high efficiency i.e. greater than 80% PSU). Many a folding box has been cut down because of crappy PSUs. A PSU that is running at 80% maximum load and has high efficiency (efficiency of PSUs is dependent on the load on the PSU.....more efficient the higher the load) will be the cheapest for you to operate.

I currently pay 13.5 cents per KWH and expect it to go up, not down.

A properly configured dual core solution can perform at the speed of 2 seperate boxes of the same frequency (AMD at least). If you figure each comparable box is running at approximately 100 watts at the wall. You are saving over $100 a year in electricity by running 1 x2 versus 2 seperate solutions. Additionally, an x2 should be cheaper to build than 2 single units if you have to buy all the components new. Heat generated is also less, so your air conditioning will be less.

Just my 2 cents.
 
One last note....

A lot of us have gone cheap and many (lot of crappers that we got somewhere cheap) as we started out folding. As it continues I feel the urge to have fewer, higher quality, more efficient systems, but that is just me.
 
Fold server helped on parts for me. But that dosen't work for everyone's situation.

I am setting up the next boxen to be a Yonah DC on that ASUS board. I hope to get a Kill - watt meter and get some readings off these boxen also for comparison.

I definately suggest the dual core solution. Much better for production in the long run. My 830 does standard (I think) WU and do not bog each other down.


Linux is free, Windows costs. Whatever you choose, make sure you have a basic background on how each works.
 
Dont know how good they are at folding but I was kicking around the idea of picking up a few via C3's. At around $65 and more importantly 12W iirc, you could build and operate an army of these for next to nothing. Anyone tried folding on these little chips?


 
A few people have used via processors in here, so search might work to find some answers, but my recollection is that they were dogs. Would be better for UD I would think since time folding is also a factor in points.
 
Hito Bahadur said:
A few people have used via processors in here, so search might work to find some answers, but my recollection is that they were dogs. Would be better for UD I would think since time folding is also a factor in points.
Click to expand...

The VIA's weren't the best thing people tried to push, while good for the odd project here and there they are great, they just don't have the oomph to really fold all that well.

That said, I'd completely agree with Hito that putting together a couple of more expensive, more efficient systems is quite a wise idea. With the cost of electricity and such, I've seen more and more folders moving that way.
 
You might consider buying a bunch of these (Sempron 3100's with pretty-darn-good motherboard for $80) (discussion here ). Use unhappy_mage's foldserver so you only have to buy 1 hard drive. Throw some cheap RAM in there, get a switch and a bunch of cables, and let'er rip at <$120 per folder. S754 Semprons may not be the speediest beasts out there, but AMD's PR ratings are actually pretty accurate, from what I've seen. With just a motherboard, processor, and RAM, you could easily power three boards off of one 450W PSU.

If you're looking for crappers, check out publicsurplus.com.

 
Mohonri said:
You might consider buying a bunch of these (Sempron 3100's with pretty-darn-good motherboard for $80) (discussion here ). Use unhappy_mage's foldserver so you only have to buy 1 hard drive. Throw some cheap RAM in there, get a switch and a bunch of cables, and let'er rip at <$120 per folder. S754 Semprons may not be the speediest beasts out there, but AMD's PR ratings are actually pretty accurate, from what I've seen. With just a motherboard, processor, and RAM, you could easily power three boards off of one 450W PSU.
Click to expand...

The 3100s have been working well for me. Last time they were on sale at Frys, I bought two (mobo+chip) for $80 each, on-board graphics. Get a 1 GB kit from newegg (2x512) and youve got everything you need except a hard drive. and PSU Then you just need to either start up a fold server or add a hard drive and fold away. They may not be as efficient as dual cores and I don't think I'll buy any more single cores in the future for folding, but they are cheap and work well.

But if you've got the money, dual core is definitely the way to go. My Opty175 folds like a beast and also powers my gaming computer quite capably. If I were to add boxen to my farm, I'd go dual core and remove some crappers. Those Athlon 1100 and 1200's I've got are pretty worthless. They fold, but with the heat they put out and the energy they suck up, dual core is the efficient way to go.

 
Outpost has a deal on for $149. Do not no about MB.

Intel® Pentium®D PROCESSOR 805
& ECS RC410L/800-M MOTHERBOARD :)
 
Well first im going on a dumpster raid, hitting up the scrapyard (they have probably a whole semi-load of various PC parts at any given time, charge 50c per pound). If those sources dont turn up cheap crappers, Ill start out slow with a few newer boxen and work my way up to a full money-sucking farm. They also had 1 cubic yard of P3 laptop mobos, with the proc's removed... I was tempted.

Best part about the scrapyard, is I can rip out things that I dont need, stack a pile up, talk to the boss-man and he usually goes "Hmm... how about 10 bucks". Scored a pile of heatpipes out of laptops, some large pop-can sized 15v 110,000uF capacitors, working twin cylinder air compressor pump (3-4hp range) for 5 bones :).

I went there about 3 months ago, they had 2 large rackmount cabinents (just what ive been looking for, for years). I had the damn little 4-banger volkswagon rabbit with me... No way would a 30x30"x8' cabinet fit in there :(. But now ive got a truck so I can haul home as much shit that will fit in 6x5x3 feet of space.
 
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