Need Suggestions for Folding Rig
 

Hey,

I'm looking at setting up a folding machine and checking out this addiction that HWC has. Just bought a couple of 8800 GTS 512 from a fellow HWCer.

Now I'm looking at getting a motherboard and cpu. Do I need a SLI board to maximize PPD? For a cpu, I was looking at a cheap e5200.

For the RAM, will 4 gigs make a difference over 2 gigs?

Any help would be great. Hopefully I can get this setup in the next month.

2 gigs of ram would be fine. My one folding farm is using 2 VM instances running on a quad core, and 3 GTX2x0 series cards all under Windows XP with no problems.

I actually thought I would need 4, but the numbers don't lie...

Any motherboard with 2 suitable PCIe x4 and up slots would be fine. SLI or Crossfire do not matter.

.... oh, and you may regret this.... :thumb:

You don't have to worry about SLI or Crossfire if you are just going to fold with the two cards.

I would actually look for a board in which you have two PCI-E video card slots which are far apart (a tri-SLI/Crossfire board will usualy have this layout, but not always required). The reason being that GPU folding creates a lot of heat, and if you can keep your cards separated by a couple of slots, it will make cooling easier.

Not a requirement, but something to look for if you are trying to decide between a couple of boards.

Very good point!

Asus P5Q Pro would be a good fit with a e5200. And it often goes on sale at NCIX or Direct Canada. Sometimes free shipping at NCIX.

Oh so true... i mean its the greatest thing to do.

Also, i have 2 rigs with just 2 gigs of ram, one with Win7 and one with Vista (the crap turned off) and they fold just fine

Just make sure you have a proper PSU for those dual GTSs. If you don't plan on folding with the CPU, I would consider a board with triple 4x (or higher) PCI-e slots to add a third GTS. Those can still fold quite well, and are selling for a low price.

Thanks for suggestions!

Yea, was looking at getting a board with maybe 4 pcie slots, lol. Do you think my PC Power and Cooling can run 4 8800 GTS 512s (if I can find 2 more)? If yes, I think I might be able to get over 20,000PPD.

I was also reading up on using multiple GPU for folding and read that I might have to make a "dummy" plug for each GPU so that each one actually folds, is that true?

Which PSU to do yo have?
The latest nvidia drivers allow for SLI folding and the use of a dummy plug is not required anymore.

Nice folding rig if you do go for 4 slots...