Sanity Check

[Jorkusmalorkus]

Doing some online windowshopping and managed to piece together a rig with a 1st gen Threadripper, an X399 mobo, and four refurbed A2000s.

A2000s use ~75w each, this seems like something that I could set in a corner and forget as it folded away happily, heating my room.

The gpu whitelist has the A2000 listed as an 8, is that right? That seems like a really high rating for that old of a card. And the CPU has 8 cores so it seems like I could dedicate an additional 4 to folding and still have each GPU have a core to itself.

I know that buying a whole computer just to fodl proten is a bad idea financially. But within the context of that bad idea, will it at least be good at it? Or is this spending a couple grand on something that won't work and I should just drop the dough on a 4090?

[Mxyzptlk]

I have several dedicated folding machines (it's a sickness).

My .02, (4) A2000's will equate to 1 3070ti in PPD and total wattage and leave the system with more expansion options. I don't know how much the A2000's cost though. But a 3070Ti could be had on Ebay for ~$450.

[Jorkusmalorkus]

the A2000s are $250 each; the primary cost is providing them a processor and mobo that can give each of them a 8x PCIe 3.0 minimum. Most of the cheaper stuff for multi-gpu setups is for mining.

where's the PPD info for A2000s coming from? interested to see that

[toTOW]

An A2000 is more or less a RTX 3060 with a lower TDP ...

[Mxyzptlk]

A good rep of PPD can be found here (along with power draws): https://folding.lar.systems/gpu_ppd/overall_ranks

If you are looking at $1000 worth of GPU... might as well go for an $800 4070ti and get many times the PPD (11million PPD) for the same watts as the (4) A2000 and you will be much farther ahead in production and you don't need so many PCIe lanes either from the MoBo and CPU.

I run a multi GPU rig with a EVGA X99 and an Intel 5960X that can support (5) 3.0 x 8 PCIe cards.... Only thing is I can't run that much power draw and stomach the power bill at the same time. I have come down to the most PPD for the least amount of wattage.

I haven't run a 4000 series on a 3.0 x 8 or x16 as of yet to know if there is a PPD loss. I doubt there is on a x16, but there may be on a x8..?

[Jorkusmalorkus]

An A2000 is more or less a RTX 3060 with a lower TDP ...

ok ...

A good rep of PPD can be found here (along with power draws): https://folding.lar.systems/gpu_ppd/overall_ranks

If you are looking at $1000 worth of GPU... might as well go for an $800 4070ti and get many times the PPD (11million PPD) for the same watts as the (4) A2000 and you will be much farther ahead in production and you don't need so many PCIe lanes either from the MoBo and CPU.

I run a multi GPU rig with a EVGA X99 and an Intel 5960X that can support (5) 3.0 x 8 PCIe cards.... Only thing is I can't run that much power draw and stomach the power bill at the same time. I have come down to the most PPD for the least amount of wattage.

I haven't run a 4000 series on a 3.0 x 8 or x16 as of yet to know if there is a PPD loss. I doubt there is on a x16, but there may be on a x8..?

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the helpful post.

Yeah I was looking at $2000-$2500 for the whole system, and for that I could easily get a 4090 and a budget mobo that'll happily give it 16 pcie lanes. Maybe a little more to get a motherboard that could potentially run two cards at 16x, but it seems like beyond those two 16x slots the cost per x16 slot goes up exponentially. Interesting. Thanks!

[Mxyzptlk]

One more thing to consider. It'll be a tight fit for a 4090 plus any card on the Mobo. You'll need a rack setup or similar.