Baha

My linux distribution finally released drivers compatible with the 4070ti Super! I run from 8PM-8AM when temperatures go down so I don't have to deal with the heat in my small space. Moving from 2x2060s brought me from ~4.5M PPD at a combined 290W to ~8.5M PPD at 185W in those 12 hours. Pretty nice to reduce power consumption by over a third and nearly double my output, wasn't expecting that based on the PPD rank database! Wish I could send data samples to it from a headless system. See you in June, @cbigfoot!

I don't usually post too much about fussing around with my PCs, but after moving to a new apartment last year and realizing I needed to downsize my home server, CoffeeBox, I finally finished the project! I'd like to share because I'm really happy with how it came out, and it's where most of my folding gets done. This was the previous chassis, a Fractal Define 7 XL. It sat in my entryway and was fine in the winter (the cables were managed after this photo was taken to not be a tripping hazard), but in the summer the lack of insulation for the entryway resulted in the hard drives running over max temperature threshold. This resulted in me moving it, and led to the moment during the November folding event where the washing machines shook screws out of it and caused a short. This box pulls a few different duties -- it runs a media server, a bunch of game servers, a discord bot, my personal website, holds backups, acts as a NAS, and runs compute projects for me. Notably, none of these really require the big box, I only went with it because it gave me lots of slots to throw old GPUs in, which has been proving increasingly expensive as electricity prices around here keep going up. It'd be cheaper in the long run for me to just downsize to a more power efficient solution. Between the need for a smaller box, wanting less power consumption, and recent back-to-back boot drive failures (thank you Samsung for your repeated faulty SSD batches, two dead 970 Pros at less than 10% of their TBW rating)... CoffeeBox 2.0! Roughly a quarter of the size (23.5% of the volume, or 28% with the drive enclosure), faster, quieter, and more power efficient. I kept the same drives, memory, and CPU (Which had recently been upgraded from an i7-8700k when 13th gen had a brief price crash due to 14th gen releasing), but swapped out basically everything else. The most noteworthy migration was from 2x2060s and 1x1080 to a single 4070 Ti super, which should just about triple GPU compute performance at half the power consumption before tuning! It's still on a UPS, but that now sits further away from the machine. CPU: Intel i9-13900k (power limited) GPU: MSI 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Motherboard: ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4 RAM: 64GB G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5-6000 PSU: Corsair SF750 Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A Chassis: Cooler Master NR200 Drive Enclosure: Sabrent 10-Bay DS-UCTB Storage: 7x WD Red Plus 12TB, 1x WD Black 8TB, 2x WD SN850x redundant boot drives Now I just need to figure out if I'm going to wait a few weeks for my linux distro to release a driver that actually SUPPORTS the 4070 Ti Super, or if I'm going to be impatient and add a repo for it...

I'm also genuinely curious to see how this shakes out -- I went through and raised the power limits for most my my cards by a few watts today before I even realized the person in front of me had stopped folding, just as a little end-of-event celebration. We'll see how it goes!

Took a trip to see family for the week, extremely pleased to see that, somehow, not a single one of my folding machines dropped out, and I've managed to hold my position. This marks the first year since I've started joining these events that my machines have managed to hold stable the entire time I was away.

Also, seeing @leadeater torture himself every event by exclusively folding the hard way (CPU WUs only!) is always a good time.

Just want to second this. One of the coolest parts of these events, to me, is seeing all of the varied hardware people manage to get up and folding. The highlights for me often aren't the giant beefcake GPUs people are throwing around, but the more inventive or unusual setups -- this particular go around, something I've really liked getting to see is the usage of Pi-based setups (and a network video recorder of all things!) from @AndrewHamOp @Oestle and @HoldSquat. I think it's pretty incredible that we've managed to get tiny power-sipping ARM boards to a point where they can complete WUs in a timely manner, and seeing people tinker with optimizing overclocks on them makes me want to pull my own Pi out of storage to play around with again.

That GTX 670 I mentioned -- the one that could be heard from multiple rooms away, with coil whine much louder than the fan -- was actually a relatively high end EVGA model. It was a GTX 670 FTW, which was a blower style card, but the very loud fan was still much quieter than the electrical noise. That being said, I bought near exclusively EVGA from that point forward until they stopped making GPUs, and never had another one coil whine again. Makes me wonder if the 600 series is what got them to start paying attention to it.

Well -- I've got it on a UPS that should clean up the power, and tried it across two power supplies, but I suppose it could be something from the local substation being screwy. Tell you what, just send me a few of these bad boys to hold onto for a bit as collateral and I'll get it sent right over: https://www.inno3d.com/en/PRODUCT_INNO3D_GEFORCE_RTX_4070_Ti_X3

This is a pretty random comment, but my 4090 FE has the loudest coil whine of any GPU I've owned in the last decade. I can hear the high pitched chirping from clear across the bedroom, and it's a perpetual, and slightly maddening, reminder that folding month is afoot. It's actually so easily audible that, when I picked it up last month, I ended up grabbing another from the local store in hopes of returning the first. That second card was even louder, with a lower pitched drone -- it sounded like a hornet's nest buzzing away in my PC, and ended up going back. I may have to invest in a case with sound deadening panels at some point. Least it still isn't as bad as my old GTX 670. Could hear that thing from multiple rooms away.

That's an interesting thought. I'm using a couple of APC Back-UPS Pro models, I hadn't thought to look into if they could send a wake signal via the USB connection.

Just found out that my power went out first thing this morning, after I'd gone to work. On the bright side, this was the first time my UPS setup has been tested, and my computers correctly went to sleep after 5 minutes, resulting in no data or progress loss. On the not so bright side, I just lost about 10 hours of folding time. Wondering if I'll get knocked down a position or two due to it.

I guess this technically means, based on current pricing, that we value positions 10-20 at roughly $400 USD per slot.

Another position upward! ... Still no way I'm breaking into the top 10 despite the slow and gradual forward march, though.

The first two things I'd think to check are the wattage on the 12v rails of your power supply (as in, just checking the spec of the power supply to make sure the 12-volt wattage isn't close to the consumption of your cards), and to fire up something like HWinfo to check the VRM temperatures of your motherboard. I know that 5th gen Ryzen ended up drawing more power than the previous gens did, and some of the lower spec previous-gen motherboards didn't have VRM cooling built to handle them. Could just be as simple as pointing a fan at them, though I'd assume it would've started back up pretty quick in that case.

First day of the entire event that my position hasn't changed! It had to stop sometime. It'll be interesting to see if I can eventually push my way into 13th or if I'm going to get blocked.