comming back to seti

[MrP]

having played with seti and stuff 5 years ago i'm thinking of coming back to the fold(!) and doing some more.

so whats a reasonable setup to dedicate to seti/boinc 24/7

am i better off going for a multi GPU setup now, or a decent multicore cpu?

[kalniel]

We already discovered a message from the Aliens. It said: "Stop pissing about searching for us and put your computers to something more productive like Folding"

If you go folding then both are good.

[MrP]

so what, AMD/intel, ati or nvidia?? 1/2/4gb ram single, dual or quad core???

i dont have huge amounts to blow on this, but some idea's would be nice

[0iD]

I use just the GPU client on a 8800GTS, does enough for me.

[peterb]

We already discovered a message from the Aliens. It said: "Stop pissing about searching for us and put your computers to something more productive like Folding"

If you go folding then both are good.

[kalniel]

so what, AMD/intel, ati or nvidia?? 1/2/4gb ram single, dual or quad core???

i dont have huge amounts to blow on this, but some idea's would be nice

Tech report have a folding benchmark for various CPU architectures here:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17545/12

Essentially the more cores the better (including hyperthreading), but there's very little difference between AMD and Intel, so go by number of cores first, then speed.

I'm not sure about the graphics card side - I would suspect that the larger number of shaders on ATI cards for the same price would give you an advantage compared to nVidia, but again it's not going to be enough to make a huge difference. You don't need much ram - 1-2gb would be fine, but it's also dirt cheap so no reason to go less than 2gb.

To get through the most results I would recommend reserving 1 core per GPU, run one GPU client, then run extra CPU clients for each of your remaining cores. But that does involve running the command line versions of the programs.. to make it easier you could just download the nice GPU client and the nice multi-core CPU client and let them sort things out and you'll still get good folding speed as long as you have 3 or more cores.

Dirt cheap suggestion: Intel Core 2 Quad, 2gb ram and an ATI 4850.

[MrP]

i was thinking core2quad, 2gb ram and a couple of 8800gt's or similar running the client on the cpu and on the cards.

however i'm guessing that i'll be needing a decent (600w?) psu for that little lot.

whats best or the os these days, windows (which?) linux or setting it up as some sort of dumb client?

[kalniel]

To run the GPU clients you need Windows. XP is very slightly better supported due to being able to run services more easily, but I don't know how long that's likely to be the case:

High performance client page:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther

[Platinum]

Currently also Nvidia cards give a much higher PPD than the ATI cards, something to do with the size of the units?, When bigger units become the norm ATI should catch up on PPD.

[MadduckUK]

so i come back a year later and there is still no gui smp, lazy