Folding Forum

I use to be big into number crunching, and got out of the scene about 10 years ago when I made the conversion to laptop only.

Current laptop is a bit of a screamer: I7-4930MX, 32gig and 1TB SSD.... but I don't want to set the poor thing on fire folding.
Recently picked up an ebay server for the home: dual Xeon L5520 (2.3ghz quad) with 72gig ram.... lot of power for a home server, not huge bragging numbers for number crunching but its gotten the bug back into me.

So here's my deal, my last desktop is 10 years old at this point (doorstop). The only thing that is drawing me back to a desktop are these 4K monitors and VR being around the corner. The server and my laptop takes care of a lot of my VM development work, I need a desktop that's tailored for graphics performance (and definitely for PPD as it'll mainly be sitting idle). I'm holding back for haswell chips to fully ramp up, so probably early spring?? Here is where I'm an idiot, what video cards should I be targeting (sorry, last video card I purchased was from matrox)? Probably looking at about 2.5k build out for the machine guts. I'd love to target graphic cards that were watt efficient (and get me a respectable VR experience).

Hello MrGoodBytes, welcome back to crunching, and to the Folding Support Forum.

This forum is hardware and software agnostic. We help support all types of hardware and don't really make recommendations here. Any recommendations might be mistaken as showing favoritism towards one company or another. While some of that is still done here, it is against the rules.

We do have a hardware section in the forum, to discuss how to optimize the folding performance of hardware that you already own. And that may be a good source of information for your future buying preferences. But 6 months from now, which appears to be your target, any recommendations will likely have changed.

That's why I sent you a Personal Message (PM) with my personal recommendation of what I would purchase "today." I wouldn't assume to predict much further in to the future than that. YGPM.

The FAH Hardware forum has a lot of good discussion about folding systems. One of the more recent ones with a lot of discussion about graphic cards is here:

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=26738

I hope I put the link in there correctly

7im and Nert, I appreciate the responses and my apologies for asking hardware specific recommendations, but with GPU's I am just so far out of the loop and I ask now because I do research my purchases and try to target purchases to "islands of stability" where I can get really good longevity of a product. Never been heavy in any kinda gaming that involved 3D but I want to be there and ready when some of the mainstream occulus titles come out (I may have had a lot of research development many years ago in object tracking and motion systems and to see that segment mature down to the consumer level and more than just as a party trick has my mind churning with renewed interest).... but I'm not going to drop significant coin on a system just for that, the fact I can put that graphics power to work for number crunching gives it an actual purpose. Thanks guys.

Little bit of an update I guess. my dual Xeon L5520 server has been averaging ~23000ppd. Which seems pretty good and its a bit higher than my I7-4930MX laptop is capable. The server's main purpose is for developing some software that requires me to build out a virtual server farm and I thought having 16 logical cores would be sufficient but I'm thinking of bumping it from dual quads @ 2.3 to dual hexs @ 3ghz (actually it would be a 2nd server). Kinda excited to see how that will improve my folding times scaling up and out the processing like that. I think I'm definitely holding off till the spring on building a GPU based system, even if that is where the real folding numbers are at. Thanks everyone for your help.