Folding Forum

Greetings,
I just got an P4 2.8HT with 2GB RAM rig so I was wondering if I could put something like GTX960/ATI380 inside and fold away?
It has Enermax 380W PSU inside, so I guess it would cope with 150W GPU?
Thanks!

Which Operating System is on this machine?

That's in my opinion the only thing that may prevent you from folding.

Sven wrote:Which Operating System is on this machine?

That's in my opinion the only thing that may prevent you from folding.

Mint XFCE.
I guess Linux is the way to go?
The PSU is 350W with 26A@12V (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817103455), so with P4@2.8, and only GPU folding, do you guys think that GTX960 would be overkill consumption-wise?
Also MB has PCIe x16 slot, so no problems there I guess?

You need an adapter cable if your gtx960 has an extra power plug, 4pin molex to 6pin gpu.

The PCIe x16 slot has a gen and speed e.g. gen2 x4, if it is too low then it will slwo down the gtx 960

I have no personal experience but I feel this rig is too old and you want a little newer one.

I have a 2006-era Mac Pro running at 2.66 GHz and a GTX 970 card inside. It does the job, although don't expect much from a CPU slot. But the PCI-e x16 slot is Gen 1 and it still cranks out around 300K PPD on average.

Instead of the GTX 960, though, I think you'd be better off getting a new 3GB GTX 1060 card which runs closer to $200 and uses less power to do so to boot. Plus, being a Pascal chip it would probably be supported longer than the Maxwell chip.

Thanks everybody, I am gunning for 1060 3GB model!

Slot bandwidth has nothing to do with Folding. I had a gtx 470 hooked to a 120GB prieteni 1.1 and it was folding with no penalties compared to 16x port.

MARSTG wrote:Slot bandwidth has nothing to do with Folding. I had a gtx 470 hooked to a 120GB prieteni 1.1 and it was folding with no penalties compared to 16x port.

That may hold for a relatively low end card such as the GTX 470, but tests by others on higher end cards have shown a 10% or higher loss in throughput using a slow PCIe slot.

A gtx 960 is good for 135-160k ppd and open mentioned that 16x port is available so where is the disagreement stemming from? Short answer is, it will work but only with Nvidia as AMD cards don't fold under Linux.

Joe_H wrote:

MARSTG wrote:Slot bandwidth has nothing to do with Folding. I had a gtx 470 hooked to a 120GB prieteni 1.1 and it was folding with no penalties compared to 16x port.

That may hold for a relatively low end card such as the GTX 470, but tests by others on higher end cards have shown a 10% or higher loss in throughput using a slow PCIe slot.

As Joe said that statement is not true, in my experiments I've seen anything from a 2% to 6% gain from PCIe 1.1 x16 to PCIe 3.0 x16. What I haven't tested yet is PCIe x4 and x1, that's where the biggest hits come

MARSTG wrote:A gtx 960 is good for 135-160k ppd and open mentioned that 16x port is available so where is the disagreement stemming from? Short answer is, it will work but only with Nvidia as AMD cards don't fold under Linux.

Also incorrect, AMD cards have been usable for folding under Linux for some time.

That is good news then. BTW how much ppd is a 380 giving? Is it comparable with 280x, in the 135k range?

R9 380 makes 150k PPD

I finally managed to put system with 1060.
I even bought a used Pentium 4 with 64-bit support running at 3Ghz. Paid 3 dollars for it
But things did not go smoothly in Linuxland so I ended up installing W7.
Its running smoothly and uses about 500MB after boot.
But it seems that something is starving my GPU because I am seeing lots of waves in GPU utilization.
Motherboard has Gen 1 x16 pcie slot and thats where my GPU is.
If you have any ideas please post them here: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=29229

Are you sure the PCIe slot is actually running at x16 or is it split with some other device?