Dedicated rig High end GPU Low end CPU?

[JonasTheMovie]

My folding rig is finished! Apart from a hdmi-headless-dummy and some magnetic filters, it´s complete. This rig will sit in a storage, it will never be played on, it´s a fully dedicated folding rig.
It´s not really suitable to have in the livingroom, this is no htpc by far. Its a small box sure but, kind of loud due to two water cooling AiOs. The Fury X card exhausts in the front, the cpu cooler lays on top of the psu in which the fan has been replaced with a cpu pwm fan. So the psu draws air from the top, througt the cooler and out of the back of the psu. The cpu fan draws air from the rest of the box which cools mobo etc.
Folding 100% at ~350kppd, while running prime95 on the cpu gives temperatures like 50C gpu and 30C cpu, but yeah, its not quiet. Hopefully the CM pump units will get a less noisy but....

Thankyou for the help!

[bruce]

Prime 95 is a rather poor stability test for FAH. (Most people who try to overclock using Prime95 will find that their system is unstable when running FAH.)

To test the GPU, I recommend FAHBench and to test the CPU, use StressCPU2. To test them together ... well, run them both. I'll bet that runs the temperatures up even more.

It never hurts to run Memtest* for a while if you suspect a problem with memory.

[3D_Now!!]

I've enjoyed reading about your quest to fulfil the concept you had in your head within your budget and parts available. I had a similar quest 2.5 years ago and 120 million points later it's still running strong!

http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/ma ... eamnum=198

How about some pictures of the new rig?

I'm curious how you rammed it all into that small case!

[bruce]

Sorry, but system pictures are prohibited here. This is a support forum for FAH's software, not a hardware site (even though we do tolerate discussions like this from time to time). You may be proud of your new system, but seeing it doesn't benefit FAH's science quest.

Forum Description and Rules - Read Before Posting!

[JonasTheMovie]

I get how you don´t want to moderate a forum full of gaming rigs, and "will this play Crysis?" with pictures of riced out cases. It would take alot of work to keep the limits between pictures of dedicated and mixed rigs etc. Not to mention all the "Your stuff sucks, go buy this instead...".

But I don´t get how discussions on optimum computing power/money ratio and inspiring people to build dedicated rigs can be something that is "tolerated at times".
What is FAHs science quest, now when you mention it bruce? Is it computer science and the ins and outs of distributed computing on a software level, or is it maximizing the available computing power in the community to facilitate medical science? Maybe it´s something else, maybe it´s a mix.

But I would love it if there was a subforum that is strictly dedicated rigs and farms, for inspiration. No custom gaming builds, no flair, just inspiration for dedication. But I respect the problem....

Right now my one foot cube is pushing 370-390kppd.

[muziqaz]

Forgive bruce, he is one of the 'younger' ones
MY argument against bruces comment would be: JonasTheMovie built a dedicated PC in SFF, and it would be very beneficial to see how he managed to put it together and get away with heat output. There are quite a few people who don't even dream of building system like that for folding, because they are afraid they wouldn't be able to fit it into small form factor case. So yeah, I say NO to flashy gaming rig show off here, but purposefully built interesting builds would be most appreciated and quite helpful to fah. Or do we want fah to become stagnant and not progress and involve more people?

[3D_Now!!]

Hiya guys,

It was not my intention to cause a ruckus!

I was not aware of the no pictures policy having seen pictures on here before, but I respect the reasons for it so my apologies once again.

I agree that seeing other dedicated rigs would be a inspirational benefit, but the rules are the rules so so be it!

Congrats to Jonas for putting together such an ambitious build and thanks sharing it with us.

Matt

[7im]

...snip...

But I would love it if there was a subforum that is strictly dedicated rigs and farms, for inspiration. No custom gaming builds, no flair, just inspiration for dedication. But I respect the problem....

You are posting in the FAH Hardware section already. Posting guidelines as noted.

@muziqaz - before you get too much "fight the man" steam built up, there is nothing stopping JTM from posting a URL to a site where the pictures are hosted. The pictures just can't be in line using the IMG tags.

[muziqaz]

There are Reddit channels around, so if one wants to share or see they can always request there

[muziqaz]

@muziqaz - before you get too much "fight the man" steam built up, there is nothing stopping JTM from posting a URL to a site where the pictures are hosted. The pictures just can't be in line using the IMG tags.

You HAD to come in and ruin this little tongue in cheek banter towards bruce I had no intention to try and overthrow the rules here, been here long enough, know the rules and am somewhat happy about them

[JonasTheMovie]

You are posting in the FAH Hardware section already. Posting guidelines as noted.

@muziqaz - before you get too much "fight the man" steam built up, there is nothing stopping JTM from posting a URL to a site where the pictures are hosted. The pictures just can't be in line using the IMG tags.

Haha, yeah I just noticed the thread has been moved out from the Newbie subforum, but this is still the FAH hardware subforum where embedded IMG are not allowed, as you said, so that is not the kind of subforum I was talking about, right? But as I tried to say, I respect the problems with such forum types.

If I was to interpret bruce correctly, this forum as a whole usually not even tolerate the discussion of these matters, wasn´that the message with "tolerated times to times" etc? I interpret that as links to images that would cause even more discussion wouldn´t be allowed. Especially with the desciption of the volatile "Anything goes" subforum.
But I am glad to hear 7im that is not the general position. I look forward to hear what the science quest of FAH is, a SC CJ or doing good.

But, this thread was to discuss the use of low end CPU with high end GPU, and the bottom line is, yeah, it works fine.

(Anyone can PM me if they are interrested in the build)

[7im]

The general position is the forum helps answer support questions in regards to installing, running, and optimizing the fah software, and occasionally the hardware it runs on.

The cautionary stance comes from experience having the hardware discussion devolve in to fanboy-isms, epeen-isms, or chat rooms.

No one is going to moderate a thread that details a system build, how built, and hardware list, plus a (non self promoting) external image link or two, so long at the whole thing also includes information about the fah client and it's resulting PPD, plus performance tweaks and results. And maybe a few Q and A posts.

But as you said, that's getting a little off topic, and this topic was to ask and answer an actual hardware question. Done and done.

[bruce]

7im said it well.

Stanford is hardware agnostic -- making no recommendations whatsoever. Their goal has always been to make full use of equipment you purchased for some other purpose.
Our forum supports this hardware-agnostic stance. If someone chooses to buy equipment specifically for FAH, they're on their own, although in the chat-room environment of the hardware forum, you'll get lots of personal opinions.

The purpose of FoldingForum is to provide support for people who have questions or where they can report that XXX isn't working. In many cases, we can offer suggestions such as a GPU driver update or a configuration adjustment or we can ascertain if it can be fixed by a change on a server.

Hardware changes rapidly and I'll bet nobody ever reviews the early topics in this forum. I probably should clean house and discard all discussions older than XX months -- hence the word "tolerated"

[JonasTheMovie]

I threw out the AiO, the pump unit drove me mad. Fitted a low profile 5 heatpipe cooler, that needed some pruning to fit right next to the PCIe slot. Turned the CPU fan upside down blowing up. Also flipped the PSU, which got the orginal fan again. Due to the big heatpipe cooler, the fan for the GPU moved to the outside of the front plate. Yeah a lot of changes, but now the rig is silent enough to sit behind the sofa, lovely.

Based on date of WU submitted and overall points the performance seems to be about 360 000ppd when running uninterrupted.
Some WUs report 420 000ppd for every other frame, and the ones in between 390 000. How come it is every second frame of the WUs takes less time?

[bruce]

The PPD and TPF are estimates, not precise numbers. It's only dependable over the long-term.

Also, some parts of the processing do not happen every frame. e.g.- checkpointing generally is one every N steps where N is set by the project owner.