Thoughts on this Folding Rig Config?

[davidcoton]

Ubuntu video drivers have come a long way - there are a couple of guides out there that can get you up and running in minutes with just a few commands in terminal, even I managed to get my gpu box up and running without difficulty and I hate Linux with a passion.

The 15.04 Ubuntu Updater GUI makes it even easier, as long as the driver you want is available. See Settings|Additional Drivers. Unfortunately nothing later than 355 shows at present. I might have to try something drastic....

[bruce]

His argument was "it's all about the CUDA cores" and 3,328 shaders (for two 970s) vs. 2,816 [for 980ti] is more cores.

This is half the truth it is also about the clock for each shader. And 980ti has faster shaders.

I normally multiply the CUDA cores by the clock rate and use those numbers for comparison. It's not a perfect measure, either, but it's closer than ignoring the clock rate.

[7im]

There are a few core 21 projects like 10494 that do use a substantial amount of system ram ... I have one running currently and the core is using ~1.5GB of resident ram. Since you're thinking about having 2 or 3 GPUs you could consider 6GB of ram as a minimum.

True. And get a fast 4 core Intel w/o HT or disable. PCI-E lance have very little bearing. You will gain next to nothing by going the X99 way.

The general consensus is that HT helps performance. Do not disable it. Get it if you can, but not a top deciding factor.

[bruce]

The general consensus is that HT helps performance. Do not disable it. Get it if you can, but not a top deciding factor.

True, but a Duo with HT is advertised as having 4 cores and it's no comparison to a quad without HT (or similarly for other numbers.) As far as FAH is concerned, a true 12 core chip (without HT) is about 1.8 times the performance as a 12-way chip counting HT.

[ChristianVirtual]

on the flavour of Linux distributions: I find Ubuntu meanwhile to much bloated with all kind of ... unwanted software components like lenses. Plus I really struggled to get the NV-drivers properly installed starting from 14.10. Tried CentOS 7 some 15 month ago and didn't not looked back (still running 12.04 on my virtual CPU folder though and whenever I get an Amazon instance of EC2, too).

[bmwman91]

So, funny thing with my build. The E5-2620V3 CPU is going back to Newegg so I can get a bunch of money back. It is being replaced with an E5-2670V3! A friend of mine works (worked?) at a small start-up that went under and they were liquidating assets. He picked up a workstation with 2 of these monster CPUs for $50 or something like that, and was generous enough to give me one of them! So, talk about "overkill", but hey, it just saved me almost $500! I am encouraging him to run the other one (and see if he can find any monster GPUs on the cheap) for F@H.

As far as the rig building goes, I finished up with the case mods this evening. Tomorrow I will get all of the computing guts installed and replace the thermal greases with some high quality stuff (Honeywell PTM3180). Apparently the Zotac cards are sort of skimpy on the thermal grease and other users have seen up to 20°C drops in temperatures after removing the heat sink, cleaning things and using decent greases that actually cover the whole die. By Wednesday I should have the OS on it and folding away!

[bmwman91]

Is it still the case that folding on the GPU while also using it to drive the computer's monitor will cause a loss of PPD? I can go get a $10 PCIe video card and stick that in to drive the monitor if it will help the GTX 980 Ti make even more PPD.


The rig is built and folding away. And MAN, it is a MONSTER. The CPU is reporting 55k-80k PPD depending on the WU, and the GPU is reporting 500k-850k PPD depending on the WU. I have OC'ed the GTX 980 Ti core and memory clocks by ~11% and bumped up the core voltage ~6%. I was able to push the OC closer to 15%, but there were some stability issues so I backed it off a little. The current settings are rock solid and give a nice little boost. I wish I could go higher (as many other users of this model have reported), but GPU-Z reports an ASIC quality of only 72% so I guess I landed a little low in the silicon lottery with this one. No big deal though.

The system is cool and quiet as well: the 140mm CPU fan stays at around 30% speed and the max core temp is 61C. This Zotac GPU has 3 90mm fans and I set the thermal target at 75C which leads to a fan speed of around 70%. As for the case, I have 2 120mm fans blowing in at the front and 2 blowing out at the top. The main air inlets in the side and rear were sealed off with some laser-cut acrylic panels I made, which I did because I wanted to keep air flowing straight in to the CPU and GPU and then exhausting out the top. I want to make a couple of internal baffles to better direct air from the CPU heat sink so that it doesn't get recirculated by the GPU It is sort of a non-issue now, but when I have 3 GPUs it may be more important!

I am also going to play with OC'ing the CPU a bit since I have lots of thermal headroom. This particular Xeon can be OC'ed because.....reasons. It should be fun to see what I can do with it!

I took a number of pictures of the build process and will probably have a build thread over on Tom's Hardware. When that happens I'll post a link in here.

[danny64x2.id]

Is it still the case that folding on the GPU while also using it to drive the computer's monitor will cause a loss of PPD? I can go get a $10 PCIe video card and stick that in to drive the monitor if it will help the GTX 980 Ti make even more PPD.


The rig is built and folding away. And MAN, it is a MONSTER. The CPU is reporting 55k-80k PPD depending on the WU, and the GPU is reporting 500k-850k PPD depending on the WU. I have OC'ed the GTX 980 Ti core and memory clocks by ~11% and bumped up the core voltage ~6%. I was able to push the OC closer to 15%, but there were some stability issues so I backed it off a little. The current settings are rock solid and give a nice little boost. I wish I could go higher (as many other users of this model have reported), but GPU-Z reports an ASIC quality of only 72% so I guess I landed a little low in the silicon lottery with this one. No big deal though.

The system is cool and quiet as well: the 140mm CPU fan stays at around 30% speed and the max core temp is 61C. This Zotac GPU has 3 90mm fans and I set the thermal target at 75C which leads to a fan speed of around 70%. As for the case, I have 2 120mm fans blowing in at the front and 2 blowing out at the top. The main air inlets in the side and rear were sealed off with some laser-cut acrylic panels I made, which I did because I wanted to keep air flowing straight in to the CPU and GPU and then exhausting out the top. I want to make a couple of internal baffles to better direct air from the CPU heat sink so that it doesn't get recirculated by the GPU It is sort of a non-issue now, but when I have 3 GPUs it may be more important!

I am also going to play with OC'ing the CPU a bit since I have lots of thermal headroom. This particular Xeon can be OC'ed because.....reasons. It should be fun to see what I can do with it!

I took a number of pictures of the build process and will probably have a build thread over on Tom's Hardware. When that happens I'll post a link in here.

similar wit above idea,

I use MSI Z97i-SLI Krait Edition, use IGP for desktop, and leave 2 gpus for dedicated f@h
I get responsive desktop experience more than when I used the first card for desktop too (connected to monitor)
...but I forget to record the ppd change

[road-runner]

On the 980ti would it work ok on an older x58 platform i7-920?

[toTOW]

This is exactly what I use to run mine . My 920 is overclocked at 3.5 GHz.

[road-runner]

I ordered one to replace some 7970s, one of these should do what two of those were doing easily I would think...