Re: GPU folding on a budget!
scaryjim...you realise the importance of a good cpu to gpu folding?
4850
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PCIe x16
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phenom II x2 @ 3.9
= around 70% cpu usage
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
seriously? What does the cpu do in all that, marshall all the work units etc to the gpu? I'm surprised it's that heavily CPU dependant! Then again, it's been a couple of year since I last even vaguely looked at folding, and I haven't investigated the GPU client that much - I'm just aware that it exists and is more efficient than the CPU client!
I think that definitely puts the kaibosh on option 1 anyway - there's no way my old Athlon XP could push enough work to a 4650, by the sounds of it! I guess the theory is to keep the system basically in balance then? Presumably using a 2400 PCI I wouldn't need as powerful a CPU as the GPU would be crunching the numbers a lot slower?
*sigh* looks like it's back to the drawing board for me... :(
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
it will be futile tbh. dual core athlon and a radeon 3850/3870 second hand from somewhere would be worthwhile though- a hell of a lot of grunt for bargain prices, you could probably put a cpu/mobo/ram/gup/hdd/case/psu and have chage from £100
but then.. quite a few phenom 1\'s for sale at knockdown prices, stick one of those in, two 3850\'s and weeeee you are able to run 2x gpu clients and an multi-core client one one comp
its addictive - thats why i stopped it :laugh:
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
MadduckUK
its addictive - thats why i stopped it :laugh:
Argh! I've got an addictive personality and I'm really interested now!!!!
I've actually just picked up a dual-core Athlon and an SLI mobo off the for sale's here with a view to folding (although I was considering making that my principle office machine so my 8800GTX doesn't eat the leccy bill when I'm just writing a static html page!) - how do ATI and NVidia GPUs compare in terms of output? I believe folding doesn't run under SLI anyway, and you have to use the 2 GPUs separately? Does one archtitecure perform better than the other?
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
i think nvidia gpu's put out a significant amount more than ati gpu's. a good nvidia card to choose is either the 384Mb 9600gso ot the 512Mb nividia 8800gt
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
scaryjim
how do ATI and NVidia GPUs compare in terms of output? I believe folding doesn't run under SLI anyway, and you have to use the 2 GPUs separately? Does one archtitecure perform better than the other?
and the other half of the and cause it seems Al has past experience of the rest - yup, you cant add another and double the speed, you have to double the number of work units you are doing simultaneously . which for all intents and purposes is the same so that's ok. remember though that that will use 2x the processor, so you DO want a quad if you are going for 2 GPU clients... because then you can run a cpu client on the spare cores:)
Re: GPU folding on a budget!
Cool, thanks for the input guys :) Guess I'll have to wait until I can afford a couple of 9600GT / 9800GT Eco cards to start really crunching through the WUs. Presumably if I was content to just run the 2 GPU clients I'd be OK with a reasonable dual-core on that kind of setup for now (I can always add a 45W Athlon II X4 later - assuming they ever come out).
I reckon I might still have a pop at making a ridiculous mini-itx folding box just for a laugh - that and the excuse to buy an Antec Mini Skeleton ;)