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Reccomendations: cheap powerful folder

C

charpman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 27, 2006
Messages
157
Hey all,

I want to built a pair of boxen for under $1,000. With the recnet C2D price cuts what is the best bang for the buck? Stick with 4mb cache?

I'm torn between the E6420 an E6600 at the moment.

I want to OC and need the best , affordable MB as well.

Planning to run a 64bit linux distro with SMP client.

No gaming, crappy on board video is fine. These will be dedicated folders.

Reccomendations?
 
charpman said:
Hey all,

I want to built a pair of boxen for under $1,000. With the recnet C2D price cuts what is the best bang for the buck? Stick with 4mb cache?

I'm torn between the E6420 an E6600 at the moment.

I want to OC and need the best , affordable MB as well.

Planning to run a 64bit linux distro with SMP client.

No gaming, crappy on board video is fine. These will be dedicated folders.

Reccomendations?
Click to expand...


Not happy with you current PPD output ??


 
The link in my sig might be a good place to start.... I'm not sure that I've updated it since the price drops (I need to update again), but at least it's a start and a ballpark to work in


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

 
OSUguy98 said:
The link in my sig might be a good place to start.... I'm not sure that I've updated it since the price drops (I need to update again), but at least it's a start and a ballpark to work in


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

Click to expand...

Indeed and I have. The MB there isn't available at NewEgg and that's where I have credit to burn. :) Are any of the 965boards equivilent? I haven't built an Intel system in quite some time, all AMD for the past 3-4 years.
 
charpman said:
More is always better no? :)
Click to expand...

Sure is :D Personnally, I've been figthing the urge to get a E6420 myself with a cheap motherboard then move the E4300 to my file server :p

To answer your question, A good setup would be a E6420 with a Gigabyte P965-DS3 and 2 Gb of cheap DDR2-667 RAM. You can build 2 boxes with this and stay under 1000$.

 
If you're building dedicated boxen, you can do it for a lot cheaper than $500/box. Get a decent OC'ing (just decent, not outlandishly) MB, the cheapest C2D you can find, 1GB of memory for each box, and the cheapest hard drive you can find (hit up the FS/FT forums!), and you'll be on your way. Particularly if you source things like PSUs and HDs from the FS/FT forums, I'd be willing to bet you could get at least 3 boxen for $1000.
 
Your only problem will be for overclocking, there aren't any really good integrated video boards that will take the core 2's to their max. So you might find cheap P965's or 650i's and drop cheap PCI-E or PCI video cards in them. It might be worth it if you can get 4-600mhz more out of each cpu. And if they're dedicated folding, you only need a gig of ram, and you could possibly run them nekkid, saving yourself some dough on the cases.
 
Imitation said:
Your only problem will be for overclocking, there aren't any really good integrated video boards that will take the core 2's to their max. So you might find cheap P965's or 650i's and drop cheap PCI-E or PCI video cards in them. It might be worth it if you can get 4-600mhz more out of each cpu. And if they're dedicated folding, you only need a gig of ram, and you could possibly run them nekkid, saving yourself some dough on the cases.
Click to expand...

Yes and you can even buy old pci video cards for 5$/each or free with shipping fee. They are more than enough for folding, especially if you go the Linux 64 bits way.

 
good points.

Am I better off going with 3 say, E4300's with only 2meg cache or spending a bit more and getting the E6420 or E6600 with 4megs cache?

I do have plenty of hard drives, cases, and even some PCI video cards. I didn't know using onboard video would cause problems when OC'ing. I also have several spare Antec True Power 400w and up power supplies.

I just need CPU - decently OC'able with 4meg cache, MB that will decently OCC and DDR ram.
 
Xilikon said:
Yes and you can even buy old pci video cards for 5$/each or free with shipping fee. They are more than enough for folding, especially if you go the Linux 64 bits way.

Click to expand...

After install I actually would be fine with no video card and just use VNC to access the box. I haven't tried to get a PC to boot with no video card in ages though, they used to complain about it quite a bit.
 
I feel the best is 4mb. It will be better in the long run, if you go with the 2mb cache, you will regret it.
 
fenderltd said:
I feel the best is 4mb. It will be better in the long run, if you go with the 2mb cache, you will regret it.
Click to expand...

Plus the 2meg allendale chips, 4300 and 4400, are known not to OC as well as the conroe chips. So I would personally go 6320 and an nvidia board so you're not memory hampered on your overclock, or a 6420 and an nvidia or P965 board. 2x512 DDR2-800 for both. Those power supplies should be ok if they have 24pin mains and a 4pin aux plug. If not factor in some decent power supplies.
 
If you have a FRYs close by watch for C2D sales. Picked up a e6600 for $189 and they
threw in a ECS mb.:cool:
 
As stated, you need no more than 1 gig of RAM for the box.

I have seen no reason to go with 4 meg cache if it's going to cost more. With the exception of a couple Windows SMP units, I don't think cache makes a damn bit of difference. Before now, cache has never had any significant effect on folding times.

I haven't looked at prices, but if you can pick up an E6420 for around the price of an E6400, I would go with that. I can't guarantee your overclock as I haven't looked up what those things can do. My E6400 runs 3.4Ghz on mild watercooling. I had it at 3.2Ghz on stock air cooling although the temps were a bit high. The E6400 are nice with the multiplier they have. Run the FSB at 400 and you have 3.2 Ghz and DDR2 800 mhz RAM will be running in spec so you won't need to get anything expensive there.

For the motherboard, stay away from chipsets with integrated graphics. They are known not to overclock as well. What the difference is I have no clue since I've never looked at a board with integrated video for myself. The Gigabyte DS3 is a nice board and it's currently running in my main system. The S3 is basically the same board but doesn't have the solid state caps. However, for about $10 more I'd go with the DS3.

Video card options were already mentioned. I'd look for an old PCI video card. I keep a few around for various things like testing systems out in case an AGP or PCI-e slot went bad. They are cheap to get. If you have a local mom & pop shop around, stop in there and see what they want for a few. They probably have a pile of them sitting in the back they'd love to get at least a couple bucks out of.

Since the Gigabyte boards use the JMicron controller for IDE, I would suggest a SATA hard drive. Current support for that chipset in Linux is rather shitty at the moment. I was able to install off of it with my old IDE DVD burner but most of the time, it would not work right and cause problems if it was hooked up. I had installed to an IDE hard drive I had on a PCI IDE card, though. It worked fine. A guy in my clan tried installing Ubuntu and Suse 10.2 to an IDE drive connected to the JMicron controller on his Asus P5B board and it would not work. He's not the most computer literate person but from the looking I did, it seems to be a common problem with the JMicron controller so I think he's actually doing things right and the controller is the problem. Besides, if the boxen are at your home, just use the extra space on the boxen as LAN storage. Easy way to make use of the extra space you pay for with a SATA drive.

I would look into something cheap but better than the stock cooler that come with the CPUs. There are a good number of them out there that don't cost an arm and a leg and do a better job at cooling. I'm not a big fan of the stock Intel heatsink that came with my E6400.

I think that about covers my recommendations and warnings. Take whatever value you want from them.

 
Current pricing per the Egg is e6400 $189 and e6600 $230 I have seen the e6600 for $189 with a free ECS mobo and without a free mobo. The op plans on running a linux distro with SMP I see no reason to get a 6400 for the difference of $20-30 now. Not bashing the 6400, it too is a hell of a chip, but he has stated these boxes are for folding so why not spend a little extra to get the best now in my eyes. Looking at the spread sheet and SMP times,
Smoke has a 6400 oc'd to 3.2 and is getting 19:42/per frame on the 2610
My recent testing with my e6600 @ 2.97 is doing 12-12:20/per frame on the 2610

Now I have calculated this:

Project 2610 is 100 frames. 100 frames x 19:42/frame is 1942mins / 60 = 32.3 hours

Project 2610 is 100 frames. 100 frames x 12:20/frame is 1220mins / 60 = 20.3 hours

So if working on a 2610, more than likely it could save you 12 hours. in 64 hours you could return 2 WU's or you could return 3 WU's if my math is correct as I fall asleep here. New projects will also tell more of the tale to see if cache really makes the difference or not.

so per frame is about 7:00 quicker. With Stanford I feel the WU's are just going to get more needy as newer cores/units get released. All in all, I am sure if you went with the 6400, 6600, 6420 you will be happy with the results. Smoke is absolutely correct about the mobo's too as this is very true with on board video, and horror stories of the JMicron

Good Night you [H] Folders ;)


 
SmokeRngs said:
As stated, you need no more than 1 gig of RAM for the box.

I have seen no reason to go with 4 meg cache if it's going to cost more. With the exception of a couple Windows SMP units, I don't think cache makes a damn bit of difference. Before now, cache has never had any significant effect on folding times.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I'm trying to decide if I want an E6320 or not. My decision would be easier if all I got was 2609/2610 units, but I got a 2MB-friendly unit last night and my E6300 is chewing right through it. I think I'm going to hold of until Penryn.

 
fenderltd said:
Current pricing per the Egg is e6400 $189 and e6600 $230 I have seen the e6600 for $189 with a free ECS mobo and without a free mobo. The op plans on running a linux distro with SMP I see no reason to get a 6400 for the difference of $20-30 now. Not bashing the 6400, it too is a hell of a chip, but he has stated these boxes are for folding so why not spend a little extra to get the best now in my eyes. Looking at the spread sheet and SMP times,
Smoke has a 6400 oc'd to 3.2 and is getting 19:42/per frame on the 2610
My recent testing with my e6600 @ 2.97 is doing 12-12:20/per frame on the 2610

Now I have calculated this:

Project 2610 is 100 frames. 100 frames x 19:42/frame is 1942mins / 60 = 32.3 hours

Project 2610 is 100 frames. 100 frames x 12:20/frame is 1220mins / 60 = 20.3 hours

So if working on a 2610, more than likely it could save you 12 hours. in 64 hours you could return 2 WU's or you could return 3 WU's if my math is correct as I fall asleep here. New projects will also tell more of the tale to see if cache really makes the difference or not.

so per frame is about 7:00 quicker. With Stanford I feel the WU's are just going to get more needy as newer cores/units get released. All in all, I am sure if you went with the 6400, 6600, 6420 you will be happy with the results. Smoke is absolutely correct about the mobo's too as this is very true with on board video, and horror stories of the JMicron

Good Night you [H] Folders ;)


Click to expand...

Yes, with big WU like 2608, 2609 and 2610, the extra cache will help tremendously. My box running @ 3.3 GHz is able to take approximately 15 mins/ frame on those WU and 10-11 mins/frame on the lighter WU. It's partially due to my overclocked memory at tight timings.

From my experience, extra cache and fast RAM will help with the WU. Myself, I'm trying to refrain from running to buy a E6420 to put in my main box and rebuild my media server using the E4300 with a cheap mobo :D

 
Hmm...just an idea, but if I wanted 2 dedicated folding machines, I'd just get 2 PS3's. Those things are folding monsters.
 
maverick777 said:
Hmm...just an idea, but if I wanted 2 dedicated folding machines, I'd just get 2 PS3's. Those things are folding monsters.
Click to expand...

I'd go that route too if you could still find the 20gig models. But now that its a 600+ entry fee, I don't know how I feel about it. Besides, if I would buy PS3's, I'd want to play on them, whereas if i built dedicated folding boxen, they wouldn't do anything else cause I already have a main pc and a lappy. But that's just me :)
 
Imitation said:
I'd go that route too if you could still find the 20gig models. But now that its a 600+ entry fee, I don't know how I feel about it. Besides, if I would buy PS3's, I'd want to play on them, whereas if i built dedicated folding boxen, they wouldn't do anything else cause I already have a main pc and a lappy. But that's just me :)
Click to expand...

And don't forget than 2x C2D boxes will produce more than 2x PS3 for cheap. IMHO, each house should only have 1 PS3 even if it is for folding and build real C2D boxes.
 
[BRO]Alaskan;1030997252 said:
Why not just build a quad core with a q6600 for $498 http://ozdirect.com/product_info.php?products_id=6340&currency=USD&language=en
add a gig of ram for $100, a Gisabyte DS3 for ~$120, a hard drive for ~$60 and a good cooler. all for ~$850. You can overclock it to 3ghz and score ~3000ppd and use less electricity than 2 boxes
Click to expand...

Make it 2gb ram for $100 or 1gb for $60 a p5n-e mobo for $130 and the rest listed above. Very good setup for a dedicated folder. Can't wait for those quads to be ~$300.
 
SmokeRngs said:
I have seen no reason to go with 4 meg cache if it's going to cost more. With the exception of a couple Windows SMP units, I don't think cache makes a damn bit of difference. Before now, cache has never had any significant effect on folding times.
Click to expand...

Actually I've seen quite a big boost with the extra cache on my opty 165. Check the time frames for similarly clocked opty's w/2mb cache vs x2's w/1mb cache.

Not saying this has been the norm, but the smp client seems to make good use of the added cache.

I'm going with an e6420 and a p5n-e board myself.......unless I change my mind again about the mobo.
 
[BRO]Alaskan;1030997252 said:
Why not just build a quad core with a q6600 for $498 http://ozdirect.com/product_info.php?products_id=6340&currency=USD&language=en
add a gig of ram for $100, a Gisabyte DS3 for ~$120, a hard drive for ~$60 and a good cooler. all for ~$850. You can overclock it to 3ghz and score ~3000ppd and use less electricity than 2 boxes
Click to expand...

From what I've read on the forums at stanford there is some question as the scalability of the client, some reports of two dual core systems out PPD'ing a single quad core.

electricity isn't an issue. I use well over 5000kwh/month as it is... what's a few more? :)
 
SpoogeMonkey said:
Actually I've seen quite a big boost with the extra cache on my opty 165. Check the time frames for similarly clocked opty's w/2mb cache vs x2's w/1mb cache.

Not saying this has been the norm, but the smp client seems to make good use of the added cache.

I'm going with an e6420 and a p5n-e board myself.......unless I change my mind again about the mobo.
Click to expand...

The p5n-e is a decent board. Mine is stable, but its far from my favorite board of all time. Layout is decent, but again, far from perfect. You absolutely MUST put a fan over the NB or swap for a new sink and a fan if you're overclocking. The NB gets nasty hot. Audio is subpar, but it works. Also, you can probably find it cheaper than newegg, I got it in january from clubIT for only 127 :)
 
maverick777 said:
Hmm...just an idea, but if I wanted 2 dedicated folding machines, I'd just get 2 PS3's. Those things are folding monsters.
Click to expand...

well for one that doesn't come in under $1000 :) for another they are only good at particular work units. Also, I'd end up playing it so then it's non-dedicated.

While I wouldn't mind having one and think it would be fun to play in my theater on a 100" screen next to the 360, I'm going to wait for PS3's to drop in price.
 
Imitation said:
The p5n-e is a decent board. Mine is stable, but its far from my favorite board of all time. Layout is decent, but again, far from perfect. You absolutely MUST put a fan over the NB or swap for a new sink and a fan if you're overclocking. The NB gets nasty hot. Audio is subpar, but it works. Also, you can probably find it cheaper than newegg, I got it in january from clubIT for only 127 :)
Click to expand...

these will be dedicated folders, so I don't really need audio, SLI or any bells and whistles.
 
SpoogeMonkey said:
Make it 2gb ram for $100 or 1gb for $60 a p5n-e mobo for $130 and the rest listed above. Very good setup for a dedicated folder. Can't wait for those quads to be ~$300.
Click to expand...

If the boxes are dedicated does the extra gig get me anything? Running Linux SMP, not windows. The Gigabyte DS3 board is cheaper than the p5n-3 stuff, is there any reason in terms of overclocking to go p5n-3?
 
charpman said:
If the boxes are dedicated does the extra gig get me anything? Running Linux SMP, not windows. The Gigabyte DS3 board is cheaper than the p5n-3 stuff, is there any reason in terms of overclocking to go p5n-3?
Click to expand...

The only thing I would think it has, is that it can run the ram "unlinked" which basically means that the board will auto select a mem ratio to keep your memory running at a certain speed. So you could put 667 in instead of 800 and run it at 667 regardless of your fsb. Granted it won't be 1:1, but its more flexible. So if you're going to run a 6320, it would make some sense. 6420 or 6600, not as much of a big deal imo.
 
thanx everyone for your input!

I think at this point I'm going with a pair of E6600's and the Gigabyte DS3 boards along with 3rd party cpu fans and 1 gig ram for each and see how they perform. I have plenty of "left over" 36gig raptors so running SATA should get me around the IDE controller issue with Linux and be more hard drive space than I need.
 
So, I'm looking through my old parts piles for PCI video cards. I found a Diamond 4meg card and my Obsidian2 - 3dfx sli on a single card. My first over $500 video card from the late 90's. I'd forgotten all about that.
 
charpman said:
So, I'm looking through my old parts piles for PCI video cards. I found a Diamond 4meg card and my Obsidian2 - 3dfx sli on a single card. My first over $500 video card from the late 90's. I'd forgotten all about that.
Click to expand...

Wow, I remember this... It was the professional line for arcade machines. Did your run this in the home machine ?

 
Xilikon said:
Wow, I remember this... It was the professional line for arcade machines. Did your run this in the home machine ?

Click to expand...

ya it was a beast at the time. Microcenter carried them and my roommate at the time and I both got one. I think it cost $550. heh PC was a P2-400 at the time with this bad boy in it. Unreal had just come out and was smooth at highest resolution....heh
 
charpman said:
ya it was a beast at the time. Microcenter carried them and my roommate at the time and I both got one. I think it cost $550. heh PC was a P2-400 at the time with this bad boy in it. Unreal had just come out and was smooth at highest resolution....heh
Click to expand...

So does this mean its seeing new light in this new machine? Or are you going to keep it hidden away in the closet? :)
 
Imitation said:
So does this mean its seeing new light in this new machine? Or are you going to keep it hidden away in the closet? :)
Click to expand...

Well at the moment it's the other PCI video card I need to get these new C2D boxes up and running. kinda a let down for it I suppose... all that "power" and it'll be in a non-gui box that does dedicated folding :) heh

If I can get the PC to run sans video card after install it will probably return to the pile...
:(
 
charpman said:
Well at the moment it's the other PCI video card I need to get these new C2D boxes up and running. kinda a let down for it I suppose... all that "power" and it'll be in a non-gui box that does dedicated folding :) heh

If I can get the PC to run sans video card after install it will probably return to the pile...
:(
Click to expand...

If it were to collect dust, it's better to leave in the machine in case.

 
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