Folding Forum

hi,
I do not see a comment on this or a ppd thread with the 2 combos. with one GTx1080 which will yield more ppd, the Z170 or X99 mobo?
also which uses more power?
Is the i7-6700 usable in both?
Heat, power consumption and ppd are all important, as is cost.
Will be buying ready built rig.
Budget is $1,500-$2,000 roughly.
And just to add, is water cooling reliable and does it help FAH?
I have found a few systems that may fit the bill.
If you have a new i7+GTX1080 system actually folding would be best input.
appreciate any and all feedback.

the chipset will have no impact on your folding as they both run at PCIe 3.0 x16, however should you decide to expand later and add a 2nd gpu x99 should be better as it will allow multiple x16 slots to actually run at x16 speed due to the number of PCIe lanes that the cpu has.

i7-6700 only works in z170 motherboards as its socket 1151, x99 is socket 2011-3 for which you need a Haswell E or Broadwell E cpu. X99 will use slightly more power but it will only be a few watts at worst. Whatever rig you get make sure it has at least a 80plus gold PSU, although platinum is better as it will save a few watts on power. You won't need to water cool the rig unless you live an a very hot part of the world, or you are pushing overclocks to the extreme. I ran a pair of 2.4 ghz 8 core xeon cpu's on standard intel hsf for 2 years straight and there was never an issue with overheating despite the room being over 30deg C most of the time.

If its a dedicated folding rig I would go decent PSU, decent mobo, small ram kit, small HDD and a mid range cpu running a flavour of Linux and add the gpu of your choice

Nathan_P wrote:If its a dedicated folding rig I would go decent PSU, decent mobo, small ram kit, small HDD and a mid range cpu running a flavour of Linux and add the gpu of your choice

Two more observations.
1) Make "gpu of your choice" into "gpus of your choice"
2) If your designated GPUs come with more than one choice of VRAM size, choose the smaller one (unless it's a non-dedicated system where fast frame-rates and high-resolution video -- i.e.-gaming -- is important to you). Save money and power/heat.

I think it is about the CPU socket. Z170 has socket 1151 and is for 4 core cpus and x99 has socket 2011-3 and is for 6-10 core cpus.
As folding gets most points using GPUs I would recommend the Z170 with 4 core cpu as it is much cheaper and use the saved money for better or more GPUs.
The pcie lanes on Z170 is enough for 2 GPUs at pcie 3.0 x8 and running fine.

I have water cooling for CPU and it is reliable but does not help FAH. Good air cooling has similar performance in cooling and noise. Your GPUs should have more than one fan, the founders edition gets too loud and cooler GPU means higher boost clock.

Also your case should have some big fans, e.g. front, side, top and back to help GPU and CPU get the heat out of the case. The case fans should run at low speed to not add to the noise and will reduce the noise of CPU and GPU. I have a case with 6 slow fans and water cooled CPU with cooler and fans on the top and 2 GPUs. I can't barely here noise at closed case even running folding at full speed.