What OS for dedicated folding box?

B

BlueMax

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 23, 2012
Messages
103
I have two boxen, one is an i5-3470 on Win7 and Radeon 7750 which folds CPU only (because AMD cards are no good for folding, right?) When I'm home and gaming, folding is paused.

The second box is a dedicated 24/7 folder: i3-2100 and GeForce GT 430.
I'd like to fold CPU/GPU.

Should I use WinXP, Win7 or something else? If Ubuntu, etc, I'll need a guide for *nix newbies.

Thanks!

(BTW, I'm disappointed the i5 doesn't get much bigger PPD than the i3! I guess HyperThreading goes a long way after all... I kinda' regret not going i7! )
 
I'd recommend using Win7 and the latest v7 client for simplicity.
 
Win7 it is!

BTW, I take it back about the processors... running all night the i5 is getting 13-14k vs the ~6000 the i3 got. I now think hyperthreading does very *little*.
 
BlueMax said:
I now think hyperthreading does very *little*.
Click to expand...

Not as much as a "true" core : yes, but very little? I have both an i5 and i7 clocked very similiarly and the i7 with HT gets approx. 50% more ppd on the same WU only some of which can be attributed to the 300 MHz speed diff. As a matter of fact I used to have the i5 clocked a little higher and the difference was wasn't much closer but I'd get the odd lock up when my kid was playing a game so I clocked it back down a couple notches. I built an i3 rig a few months ago but sold it to my buddy to give to his mom (borged) and it would come close to my Q6600 ppd (but it ran a hell of alot quieter with less heat and watts from the wall). I would guess the basic architecture of the i3 is more of a factor than just the HT.
 
What about a 4P? Will windows 7 be close to linux? Also, what about windows 8? Thinking of adding GPU to the 4P possibly. Thanks :).
 
As far as I am aware, there are no bigadv WU for windows of any flavor, so if you want to maximize points, native linux or a linux VM is the only game in town. Of course you can get normal SMP WU, but on a 4P that would make baby jeebus cry ;)
 
And, Windows 7 won't support over 2 processors. If you went Windows on a 4p, you would need Server 2008 R2.
 
for 1 cpu win 7 v7 client

for 2 cpus win8 +hypervisor w/ linux vm will get you ~97% of native linux performance for bigadv.
for 4 or more linux....
 
I'm not fully sure what you are asking, but there is no linux GPU client. Any GPU folding will involve windows (there has been some discussion of WINE and VirtualBox, but I have not seen any significant suiccess)
 
NVidia based video cards run fairly well under wine with the NVidia driver and cuda libraries. Just a huge PITA to setup. One looses about 10% to 15% on points running under wine. If you want to fold with GPUs, wine is the route to go until Stanford gets their act together.
 
krips said:
Can you run gpu folding at the same time as gpu on linux?
Click to expand...

As has been stated, there is *currently* no native linux GPU client, however some of the PandeGroup team have stated that this is being worked on. PG does not give ETAs on new stuff, just "soon" or "not soon". Historically, soon can be days, weeks, months or years :)
 
krips said:
Can you run gpu folding at the same time as gpu on linux?
Click to expand...

jfb9301 said:
I'm not fully sure what you are asking, but there is no linux GPU client. Any GPU folding will involve windows (there has been some discussion of WINE and VirtualBox, but I have not seen any significant suiccess)
Click to expand...

What I think he meant was can you GPU fold on Windows while running say bigadv on a Linux VM. I would think that would be certainly possible, the only issue would be to make sure that the VM doesn't starve the Windows GPU by using up all of the CPU cycles. You could possibly use HyperV to put a limit of like 95% of total cpu usage for your Linux VM, and that should leave enough room for the host OS to fold with a GPU.
 
bman212121 said:
What I think he meant was can you GPU fold on Windows while running say bigadv on a Linux VM. I would think that would be certainly possible, the only issue would be to make sure that the VM doesn't starve the Windows GPU by using up all of the CPU cycles. You could possibly use HyperV to put a limit of like 95% of total cpu usage for your Linux VM, and that should leave enough room for the host OS to fold with a GPU.
Click to expand...

Certainly possible. PPD wise it is the preferred method for GPU + SMP folding.

I've been doing just that for the last 2 years on the top rig in my sig, and have been doing it with other machines for the last 3.5 years.
No limit needs to be set to ensure CPU cycles for the GPU, if anything the GPU will kill your CPU PPD by robbing cycles from your SMP folding.
 
Windows Server 2012 works for folding fine.

The best OS for folding would be Xubuntu.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top