Folding system.

[Draex]

Well I have been bitten by the folding addiction, I have 3 GPU's on the way to crank out some more PPD, and am already looking towards setting up a Third machine for folding sometime after christmas, I will be getting a board with atleast 4 PCI-E 16 slots.

My question is this, does the cost/ppd ratio of an OC'd I7 920 + 1366 Board + Triple Channel Mem beat that of OC'd Xeon X3440 + 1156 Board + Dual Channel Mem.

Both CPU's have HT.

[Arinoth]

From personal experience/knowledge, an i7 920 OC'd at 3.8GHz can yield doing big work units (including the bonus for getting the wu done early) about 25k ppd as each wu when completed with the bonus points comes out to be about 55k (and it takes about 2.4 days per big wu)

[chrisk]

Welcome to The Addiction.

How much ram are you putting in the Xeon rig? Seems that for the bigadv WUs, you want 8 'cores' that a HT rig would provide (so you have that in both of your suggested rigs), but at least 4.6GB of ram is required for the vmware machine alone. That puts 6GB of ram (a typical i7 920 rig amount) as the ideal minimum. My i7 rig, folding the bigadv units, is easily using 5.5Gb of ram.

If you were going to pile 8GB of ram in that Xeon rig, then that would be good...if it were 4GB, then I would advise against it.

[Draex]

I would be putting 8 or 12GB in it regardless, also is there any reason the Xeon would not be able to be overclocked enough to complete the Bigwu's in a similar amount of time?

[Arinoth]

5.5GB of ram for your VMware? I had mine working at 3.6GB, now i think i should have at it at 4GB but 5.5GB seems a little excess.

[_dangtx_]

you should see big numbers on the cpu


cost/ppd? im still on gpu side :)

[chrisk]

Originally Posted by Arinoth

5.5GB of ram for your VMware? I had mine working at 3.6GB, now i think i should have at it at 4GB but 5.5GB seems a little excess.

Bigadv is recommended to have 4.6GB allocated to the vmware. The rest would have been what I was running.

[Arinoth]

Originally Posted by chriskwarren

Bigadv is recommended to have 4.6GB allocated to the vmware. The rest would have been what I was running.

I thought the recommended was at least 4GB, 512MB per core/thread

Edit: go on irc, post tag gets lame sometimes

[Soultribunal]

I'm not familiar with these big WU's but GPU's are fairly good if you get the right one for PPD.
And a board that can handle 4 GPU's would rock.

ST

[Dead Things]

Actually, the officially recommended RAM dedicated per folding core is 1024MB - so technically, they want you to allocate 8192MB for an 8-core bigadv client. But user reports have revealed that you can get away with as little as 4608MB for an 8-core bigadv client. Any less than that, and you will eventually start losing WUs due to lack of RAM.

And this is consistent with what we have found before with the Linux SMP client - is that you need 1152MB of RAM for every two folding cores.

On my i7 860 system, with bigadv running in a VM and six GPU clients, plus having firefox open, my RAM usage is at 6792MB currently.

(edited because I had mixed up some numbers)