Folding Forum

sptn. wrote:

gunnarre wrote: In the end it tourned out to be an 2,2 GHz CPU (E1500). I would be lucky when an 1060 would be a suitable option. That's exactly what I found to be my budget-solution. I found some for ~100€ in the bay.

That CPU could run 2 GTX 1070 GPUs in Linux, so long your motherboard supports them.
I would presume that 2x GTX1080, or 1080Ti would be somewhat bottlenecked.

That sounds good, but I have just one Slot, so only one card. Also because I am limited to max. 420W Power consumption.

Just in case I would decide to build an "budget" folding rack with a graphic card. Is there a list about what componends to use? I am sure someone did that already. Could not find anything using the search..

Your motherboard supports Intel® Core™2 Quad Processors (https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/in ... cpusupport).
This means that for a very low cost you could upgrade your cpu to something that is still not very energy efficient, but anyway more than decent for Folding@Home or Boinc.

If you look on Ebay, you could find a lot of Xeon processors compatible with your motherboard. Your socket is 775 while Xeon's socket is 771. These two sockets are compatible with an easy modification of the motherboard (you just have to cut a tiny piece of plastic with a knife). By upgrading to Xeon Quad Core you could get a good quad core system with less than 20$.
For example, my computer (Abit IP35-V motherboard) had a shitty Celeron E1200 (similar to yours)... With 20€ I put a Xeon L5420 on it.
Xeon L5420 is built on 45nm, it's 2.5gHZ Quad Core and has a TDP of only 50W. If you are lucky and get a L5450 for a low cost, then you would have 3gHZ Quad Core with the same 50W TDP. Definitely a good and cheap system for distributed computing.
If you do not want to modify the motherboard (I assure you, it's very very easy) you could look for 775 quad core processors, such as Q9400, even if they are built on 65nm and consume 65W)

I drive a Nvidia 750Ti with no bottleneck of any sort with a single core of my L5420. Probably you could use a 1650 without any issue, but I cannot assure you about it.

Then, of course, if you spend 400$ for a Ryzen system you will double the performance with the same energy consumption... But not anyone has 400$ to spend for volounteer computing.

manalog wrote:Your motherboard supports Intel® Core™2 Quad Processors (https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/in ... cpusupport).
This means that for a very low cost you could upgrade your cpu to something that is still not very energy efficient, but anyway more than decent for Folding@Home or Boinc.
If you look on Ebay, you could find a lot [...]
Then, of course, if you spend 400$ for a Ryzen system you will double the performance with the same energy consumption... But not anyone has 400$ to spend for volounteer computing.

Thank you for this advice. Upgrading to the highest possible CPU the board supports is also planned. I found several suitable Q9xxx CPUs for ~20€. I got a cheap 1060 now and want to get Ubuntu Running first. If I get this to folding I will Upgrade the CPU.

Money is not the problem but I just wanted to "recycle" the hardware I have with the lowest possible investments to get some results.
I do not want to imagine the discussion unfolding when I spend money on something and have to explain this to my wife. Hiding it under cover right now

sptn. wrote:

manalog wrote:...Hiding it under cover right now

Hey, you found the surprise for <insert next significant event>

I'm running one machine with a 2-way CPU. FAH for Windows will not support more than one CPU. I'm uncertain about LInux.

A Celeron tends to consume more power than other CPUs for equal performance.

So I got ubuntu 20.04 running now.
As an complete newbie to Linux it was quite easy to install, what surprised me to some point.
Only question I have: Is it usual, that the Linux setup and first startup is very slow? After finishing the setup I bootet it just once to see if the components were recognized by the OS. The installation took about 30-45 minutes and the startup at least 5 minutes.
When checking 'Settings->Info' I found the correct CPU, RAM, GPU and HDD storage, what tells me that Linux can work with the hardware. But is 4 Gig of ram and an 2,2 GHz Celeron to slow for Linux?
I will perform a BIOS and Chipset update, due to the fact that the whole thing is >10 years old. Maybe this speeds things a bit up.

If you're booting off a physical disk rather than an SSD, it may take a while to start up. You can disable a lot of the desktop stuff if it's purely for folding but the best answer is to keep it running 24/7

5 minutes a bit much for a linux bootup even from a slow harddrive. If your SATA drive cable is bad or bent too much, your drive might be running at a slower than normal disk speed. Or you might be pausing on some other hardware error.

If you can remove the "quiet splash" from your boot options, you will get to see the bootup procedure while it's happening, so you can see any error messages during boot. Otherwise, you might look through the system logs or "dmesg" to see if something else is making your boot slow.

At initial installation, some Linux versions (aside from configuring the PC, and installing the OS) perform a live update, so it may take a bit longer.

You may also want to check your BIOS, to see if no trusted platform, or network booting is enabled. Generally the less devices are enabled on boot, the better.
I just keep SSD and USB options open. If your bios supports boot with floppy, CD ROM, or other it's best to disable those.
Also, make sure your bios is optimized. CPU isn't overheating, RAM is running fine, no DMA errors (like PCIE cards conflicting with one another).
The list is very long.
For $20 you can buy a 64-128GB (256GB for a few bucks more) SSD, which speeds up booting by a lot!

Unlike other platforms, Linux is expected to need rebooting once every few years.

bruce wrote:Unlike other platforms, Linux is expected to need rebooting once every few years.

Windows on good hardware can go for a long time without rebooting just fine. Crap hardware and sometimes crap software are the problem. I have an old win xp computer that currently has 491 days uptime. It gets rebooted due to power outages more than any other reason for the last 5 years.

FYI, Windows XP and Windows 7 no longer receive any patches so can be left as is. However, with Windows 10, it does need to be re-booted after patch Tuesday. In my experience, Linux can update without rebooting except the kernel update. My uptime for Linux system was many weeks while Windows would never cross 4 weeks.

BTW, I do think we have gone off-topic so let's continue with the original topic and open up a new thread if anyone would like to talk about OS uptime

So we performed all the Updates and things are working way better now. Still kind of slow but that might ne caused by the HDD and CPU. Forgot how slow they were compared to todays SSDs.

The Celeron is Folding but takes 2.4 days for one ~2500Point WU. As expected not usable for Folding. Running the System monitor in the back while messing around shows that the CPU sometimes is on 100% just from doing almost nothing than updating. So no wonder why the System is slow. I got a Core 2 Quadro now and I am curious how this will speed things up.

But back to folding: a Problem that my collegue experienced with his GPU when he installed Linux on his IdeaPad is now occurring at my machine.
GPU seems to stuck at Download. He solved the problem by installing the CUDA Toolkit while nothing else worked. But theoretically the GPU should work only with OpenCL I guess.

I will show the log tomorrow, but maybe there are some quick thoughts.

sptn. wrote:...But back to folding: a Problem that my collegue experienced with his GPU when he installed Linux on his IdeaPad is now occurring at my machine.
GPU seems to stuck at Download. He solved the problem by installing the CUDA Toolkit while nothing else worked. But theoretically the GPU should work only with OpenCL I guess...

For Nvidia GPUs, you would need:
1) Ensure that Linux is fully updated.
2) Install the proprietary drivers by Nvidia
3) Install OpenCL package (sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev)
4) Install FAHClient

For AMD GPUs, you would need:
0) Luck & Knowledge
1) Ensure that Linux is fully updated.
2) Install the proprietary drivers by AMD (it has to be the correct version for your GPU)
3) Install OpenCL package (sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev)
4) Install FAHClient