Whats a good rig for folding?
 

I've sorta wanted to help out with folding for HWC for awhile since I love this place. Now would a server with dual quads ( E5345 and or E5355 ) and alot of ram be good? Is more ram the better or is CPU power the best? I just need some help here to get my feet wet, these are 1u server blades. So would they be good and would alot of ram be good? If so I could easily get 32gb+ in each server. So let me know guys :)

CPU power. Those might do 5-6000 PPD or so. RAM is not going to have a huge influence.

It depends what you are after - ppd / $, or ppd / W?

ppd = points-per-day

GPUs are the Kings of ppd / $, while CPUs (especially the AMD 6174s) are the ppd / W winners.

When EVGA SR-X mobos comes out people will be falling all over themselves to sell off their SR-2s. Some good deals may be had then.......:thumb:

Any computer is great for folding.It doesnt matter , just contribute.

Don't worry about being competitive at first , just get going.

:thumb:

even 4 GB should be enough. let us know how much they will produce.

+1 no need to go to a 2p or 4p folding server right away. Even just folding on a 2500k or 1090T can yield some pretty nice points at low power costs. Also you could fold on your gtx 260 it should be able to pull a decent amount of points but will use a lot of power.

Would I be able to do say....Twenty four cores and say two 260 GTX's or some radeon 5/6 series cards? Could I fold on both at once you think?

Yes, you can. But the point of CPU folding is using the bonus point system - any cycles that GPU folding steals from the CPU will be less points. And they are calculated exponentially.
You have to decide if you choose GPU folding, or CPU folding per motherboard.

you should stay with the 24 cores. GPU folding takes a lot of electricity. 3.0charlie says his sig rig takes only about 500W from the wall. A system with a pair of 260GTX will draw the same power as a 4P system but will yield you around 16-17K PPD while the system with 24 cores will give 20 times more.