Join the SatelliteGuys Folding@Home Team!

[Voyager6]

Congrats to BM_Bowles for reaching 5 Million Points.

 

[Voyager6]

Congrats to gdarwin for reaching 600K Points.

 

[Foxbat]

...order a Dell T7400 dual 3.0 GHz Xeon quad-core processor workstation for $256 on Amazon...

I was hoping this would arrive before the end of the month (you never know with the third parties through Amazon) but tracking has it en route, so hopefully I can get this contributing to my Folding Farm before too long!

 

[SatinKzo]

I stopped Folding when I moved to Louisiana. Couldn't justify the heat output during majority of the year just to pay to cool it down again.

 

[Foxbat]

I stopped Folding when I moved to Louisiana. Couldn't justify the heat output during majority of the year just to pay to cool it down again.

Ah, I can understand that. When I had my Mac Pro in the upstairs office the heat in the Summertime made me reconsider running 24/7. Now it's down in the basement so it isn't as noticeable in the Summer and its heat output is right under the kitchen so it make the tile floor a little easier to take in the winter!

Looks like the recent weather system brought your temps down into the 40s. Maybe some extra heat sounds nice right about now?

 

[Voyager6]

In just over a week, SatGuys will pass not one but two teams. No Heroes Folding Team and BYU both will fall to the Satguys juggernaut.

 

[Foxbat]

Tick-tock, BYU, tick-tock...

BTW, my Dell T7400 arrived the other day and man! It is a beast! It dwarfs my Mac Pro and even my old HP xw8200. I wasn't 100% sure what was going to be on the inside for $256, but it has two PCI-e x16 slots (each the full 16 lanes!), 16 GB of RAM, two 500 GB SATA drives (RAID 1 via the onboard RAID controller) and best of all, two 4-core Xeon CPUs running at 3.0 GHz with SpeedStep capacity. Best of all, though, is it has a 1000 Watt power supply, so when I get some modern GPUs (it came with a Quadro FX 570 which Stanford dropped two years back) it should be my Points monster!

Time to click on the Shop Amazon.com link up at the top of the page...

 

[KE4EST]

I wish I could find a deal like that.

 

[Voyager6]

Congrats to Samy60 for reaching 200K Points.

 

[Foxbat]

Well, there is one issue with the Dell T7400 I got. It seems to have a bad memory DIMM in slot 3 of 4 (according to POST) so I have to press F1 to continue after a boot/reboot. With 16 GB of RAM I can afford to pull the two DIMMs to see if that makes the errors go away.

Preliminary Folding with just the CPU slot looks like ~20K Points per Day.

 

[Voyager6]

Congrats to Scorpion.sting for reaching 250 Million Points.

 

[Voyager6]

Less than three days until we pass BYU.

 

[Foxbat]

Preliminary Folding with just the CPU slot looks like ~20K Points per Day.

Now that this Folder has done the minimum number of Work Units to qualify it for extra Bonus Points, it appears to be good enough for closer to 25K PPD. That's the good news.

The bad news is my GTX 960 in my Mac Pro is now reporting less than 110K PPD for the WU it's currently processing. I guess the mix of Projects from Pande Labs is getting more advanced and it's taking a toll on the lesser setups. So my Folding Farm is barely treading water:

Less than three days until we pass BYU.

Brigham Young University: 36 Hours - #98
No Heroes Folding Team: 70 Hours - #97
Bad Birdies: 100 Hours - #98
Free Republic Folders: 7 Days - #97
Shippensburg University: 10 Days - #96
Team Engadget: 14 Days - #95

 

[KE4EST]

Same happens with my 960. One project will be 190's and the next will be 105 then 115, etc.
It used to do around 175K consistently.
Time for a 970.

 

[Foxbat]

Congratulations, KE4EST, on surpassing 40,000,000 Points!

Since I was able to find the Dell T7400 for only $250, my GPU budget grew enough to maybe pop for one of these:

 

[KE4EST]

Congratulations, KE4EST, on surpassing 40,000,000 Points!

Thanks!

 

[KE4EST]

Since I was able to find the Dell T7400 for only $250, my GPU budget grew enough to maybe pop for one of these:

I have been trying to figure this out also.
Would it not be better to run two 970's at the same price? Since the sole purpose is for folding?
You would get more cuda cores.
or....????
I suppose it would consume a little power than two 970's.

Thoughts??

 

[Foxbat]

Well, of course, if you're going to throw Logic into the equation, you would be getting more shaders/CUDA cores for the money with the pair of GTX 970 cards. It also allows me to get one card now and the second one later to ease the finance. Plus, it sounds like there might be new GPUs being announced in the next 6 months which might drive the price of the second card down.

Of course, on the other hand the memory bus is only 256 bits instead of 384, and we're talking 1664 CUDA cores versus 2816 cores. AnandTech Benchmarks for the 970 vs. 980 Ti shows about what you'd expect: The 50% more cores and memory yields improvements in most benchmarks of half again the performance, but some metrics are equal or actually worse for the 980 Ti.

Logic. Thanks for being a buzz-kill.

 

[KE4EST]

I know where you are coming from I have looked at the 980Ti a gazillion times. It is the coolness of having a 980Ti.
Then I go back to thinking well I can put in two cards and I can get more cuda cores for the same price...so.........

Yes I am interested in how well these new cards that are coming perform.
Something to ponder on black Friday if performance is enough to justify the "New in town" prices.

 

[EatMyVolts]

I've always heard that two 970's beats a 980 for folding. One of these days I'll break down and get a second 970 and see what it does.

I'd avoid Zotac myself, I had one of their cards some time ago and the quality was lacking. It overheated to beat the band until I took it apart, smoothed the ridges (more like grooves) off the heat sink, and reassembled it with good thermal compound. Ya just shouldn't have to do that.