power advice.

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Zohar78

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 12, 2004
Messages
1,334
hey guys,
Im just now getting back into folding, but alot of things have changed since i last folded.
I quit when i went to Basic and AIT. At that time i was liveing with my parents so power comsuption wasnt too much of a problem. Now with me living on my own, im going have to watch the power bill. What do u think is the cost to have about 4-5 machines running in my house? I heard it was bout 3-5 dollars a box genereally. What are the ways to try and cut down power usage and such?
Heres the specs: 1) athlon 64 3000 (in the mail now. woot.) 2)athlon xp 2500, 3) Athlon xp 3000 4) P4 2.66 (non HT)

Wow.. how much has folding changed..
 
You could dump, one, two, maybe even three of the computers onto me and I'll carry the burden of the power bill. ;)

Computers themselves dont take much power, comparatively. For me, its the monitors that gets me. I've got a 525VA UPS, computer (120W at the very most, more likely 110W), my phone (dunno how much power it consumes, not much I would assume), and two monitors. The two monitors alone take a whole hell of a lot of power. Every time I turn them both on the UPS beeps at me telling me its drawing too much power. Others I'm sure will give you better ideas, but it all depends on what you do with them. If they are dedicated folders and dont do much else, I'd recommend VNC'ing into them and run them headless so the monitors don't drain you to off too much money.

Welcome (back?) to folding. Glad to have you. :)
 
I believe it was determined that a headless machine burns about 100-120 watts.

You could, do it a bit more economical... you could sell off a few machines, and build 1 or 2 really powerful computers that will draw about the same as an older one, but will rip through protein. Something in the dual processor arena. That is someplace I know I'm headed as I'm amassing computers.
Think about this:
A decent machine running dual 2400 35watter's can do nearly 5ghz on its own and use only a bit more elecricity then a single ghz machine.
 
hmm...
Whats the best place to buy dual proc amd boards? my Seargent is thinking about going dual and im going to build the machine for him. if i remember correctly, the asus and Gigabyte boards, u dont have to use ECC DDR ram right?

Whats the best place to buy the dual proc boards.. Newegg doesnt seem to carry many of them around.
 
Check the Multiprocessing Systems Forum. And if you have any other questions, go to irc.freenode.net #2cpu on IRC. There are some good guys there that really know their SMP stuff. [H]emi_426 from the forums here is on there as well. I went there a lot before I switched ISPs and realized the entire IP range was blocked. :(
 
Another good source for gear is Outpost.com. Got some killer gear from them recently, and I am not dissappointed.
 
Welcome back Zohar78, it has been a while since we've seen you around these parts!

If you've already got the machines, there's not much you can do to conserve power unless you get tricky. You can try clocking your graphics card down, which saves a little juice and heat. Another interesting idea I have never tried is to run folding from a network drive so that your local HD can spin down. You'd have to run it manually after you finish mapping a drive, but it would allow you to essentially only have one HD running for all your folding machines whenever Windows didn't need anything from the local drive. Most importantly, remember to keep your monitors turned off.
 
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