mattheginger

Note:  it's definitely technology. It's always technology.
 
Thanks for all the hard work you do and the PITA technology you have to deal with on a daily basis 🤣

Yeah, I was away from home for a week so of course that's when a UPS died in my rack because hardware always knows when I'm gone.
 
Back up as of yesterday, almost all services restored.

I am very happy, I have hit the top 10.  I don't know as I will keep it for long or ever again, but I have made it at least once.
 

I thought the Aorus x570 Master had lost half of it's SATA Ports as the RAID 10 Array failed. Turns out that 2 drives in the RAID 10 had failed silently with Storage Spaces NOT throwing any Errors. Oh Joy. Thank Goodness for Backups!
 
Picked up:
Asus ProArt x670e Wifi Ryzen 9 7950x Corsair SF750W Titanium PS MSI Ventus 2x RTX 4070 Ti Super (Folding) 4 x Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5-5600 (Running at JEDEC 3600 until I can get the RAM Tuned) 2 x 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS Drives 2 x 140mm BeQuiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 PWM (Front Intake) 1 x 120mm BeQuiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 PWM (Rear Exhaust) 2 x 120mm BeQuiet! Silent Wings HS PWM (Bottom Intake) Reused:
Lin-Li O11 Air Mini 2 x Samsung 980 Pro 512GB PCIe3 NVMe (OS) EVGA 240mm CLC FirePro W4100 (Display Out) Installed FANControl to manage Cooling. Connected EVGA 120mm AIO Fans to CPU Fan Header and AIO to Pump Header in DC Mode.
 
Created Curves:
75% Flat for AIO Pump CPU for AIO Fans, Top Front Intake GPU for Front Bottom and Bottom Front and Bottom Rear Intakes using Sensor from Folding GPU GPU and CPU "Max" Curve for the Rear Exhaust Fan The Gigabyte x570 Master, 5950x and 128GB DDR4-3200 and 650W Corsair PS will be spares for my Folding Rigs

Here is a demonstration of the effect of binning on efficiency.
 
 The 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super are both based on the AD103 die. The 4070 ti super at the bottom of the stack and the 4080 Super at the top. Both working on p18220 we see Yields of 14.5 vs. 17.2MPPD:

 
So here's the kicker:

 
The 4080 Super is drawing less power while running at a lower clock speed and is still out-performing the 4070 ti Super.

It's well known the computer gods require a blood sacrifice
 
 

Thanks @Gorgon. Yeah I did look at both the ProArt and Strix models, but in the end decided to just build a B650 system. And perhaps I'll chuck a 40 series card in my old Ivy bridge system at some point, which my new build has now made redundant. 
 
Interestingly though, I'm now getting significantly better numbers from my 4070 (non-Ti) in the new system. The card is now topping out at 97% utilisation, whereas before it never surpassed ~92%. This is netting approx an extra 1.5m PPD on the average WU. Could be the difference between PCie 3.0 vs 4.0 perhaps?
 
 

I had one of my dual GPU motherboards fail during Folding month and so had to move the GPUs to my last two remaining spare AM4 motherboards which are Gigabyte Aorus b450m models I picked up for $80Cdn each when they were on Clearance last year.  But these boards are micro ATA (mATX) and thus could only support one GPU each.
 
With the 4080 Supers being better values now I picked up a couple of the Gigabyte Gaming OC models. Being 3.76 Slots wide these big boys fit with just a couple of mm to spare to not overhang the I/O connectors at the bottom of the motherboards. A case swap was also required for one system as the Fractal Define C was too short to accommodate the 342mm GPU length so the guts were transplanted to a spare Fractal Define S.
 
As expected these GPUs are most efficient being at the top of the AD103 stack. One even draws just 3W at idle.
 
 

Welp, its been a couple days of cleaning but I'm finally starting to see some progress!

 
Too bad for the EK block, which has most of the nickel plating either removed or damaged at this point. The alphacool blocks with their chrome plating took ultrasonic cleaning without issues!
 

We really need a "eek!" reaction for posts

Anyone in for some hardware gore?
 
Guess alphacool loop cleaner and a semi-copper radiator don't mix all too well.

Doing some research for something else I surveyed the x670e motherboards to see which ones have PCIe5 x8/x8 slots:
 
About the only "reasonably" priced x670e boards out there are the Asus ProArt and Strix x670e-e and the ASRock TaiChi. The MSI Carbon WiFi would be a contender but rather than shifting all the PCIe slots down 1 slot like the rest they decided to shift everything down 2-slots meaning the lower card will, in most cases, collide with the PSU Shroud.
 
Gigabyte appears to be avoiding having to buy re-drivers on their 670e motherboards in favor of even more m.2 slots and so are out of the running. Which makes me wonder why the Extreme and Master are so expensive.

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...

For the first time in quite some time I've added a new card to my collection of F@h cards. This time it's a reference GTX 980, and it seems to be folding very well. It's a Maxwell card, so the PPD is quite low compared to everything else I'm running, but that's alright for me. I mostly just like the look of those older reference cards. 

You'll definitely lose some performance running a modern card at 4x off the PCH. It's not like cryptomining where the bus width and latency doesn't matter so much. One of my boxes runs two cards, and it's got an EVGA Z590 board I got on deep discount. I picked it because not only would it do pcie 4.0 x8/x8, but it also has extra space between the 1st and 2nd physical x16 slots than is typical--helps with cooling for sure. I'd just keep an eye out for deals on boards that fit your requirements and jump when the opportunity comes up. I wouldn't go pay full retail for a high end board for this.

It was a simpler time... 😌
 

It was a simpler time... 😌
 

It was a simpler time... 😌
 

An oldie but a goodie - z370 Aorus Gaming 5 with a i9-9900k (remember when we used to think these ran hot?)

With the refresh to the 4000-series I picked up a couple of MSI 4070ti Super GPUs, one a tri-axial Gaming X Slim and the other a dual-axial fan Ventus 2x. Both of these cards are slightly under 2.5 slots in width and thus are suitable for running in a dual GPU rig with 3-slot spacing if one applies clock or power limits.
 
Now these two "4070s," unlike the older 4070ti which sat at the top of the AD104 stack, sit at the bottom of the AD103 Stack (4070 ti Super; 4080, 4080 Super).
 
The implication of this is, unlike the 4070 ti which would have been the best binned silicon in the AD104 stack, the 4070 ti Supers are likely the worst binned silicon in in the AD103 stack so we should expect them to be less efficient that the 4080 or 4080 Supers like we observed with the 4070 where it, and the lower models in AD104 stack showed less efficiency compared to the 4070ti.
 
Here's the Efficiency vs. Clock Speed plots for both GPUs:


 
Both these appear to have a peak efficiency around a clock speed of 2400MHz.

Picked up a couple of 4070 Ti Supers to add to the Fold. They appear to be most efficient around 2400MHz.
450W 29MPPD Mini Space Heater:

It could be, but the timing is just weird then. Why would contact between the block and the card die right when F@H also had server issues? 🤔 
 
That being said, deep cleaning is almost done, let's see what this does.

Due to the cost of the DDR5-based systems I'm still running mostly x570 with Gen4 x8/x8 from the CPU.
 
Unfortunately from what I recall only the b550 Vision D and Vision D-P were the only two low cost motherboards with x8/x8 from the CPU (i.e. with PCIe Gen4 switches) with 3-slot spacing. AFAIK all the b650 motherboards have only x16 from the CPU and all other slots are x4 from the Chipset and most of those are Gen3 as the PCIe Gen5 Re-Drivers and Switches are hellishly expensive and Motherboard manufacturers seem to be focusing more on lots of M.2 slots.
 
Still if you can find a b650 motherboard with PCIe Gen4 from the Chip Set at x4 that would be equivalent to Gen3 x8 and so you shouldn't loose too much yield with "just" a 4070, But most b650 motherboards appear to have just PCIe3 x1 to the Chipset connected slots so your likely stuck with having to get a 670 or 670E which are waaay more expensive.
 
The other option is to go off-label and get a PCIe Gen4 m.2 -> PCIe x16 adapter and use the CPU-connected m.2 slot for the second GPU and install the OS on one of the Chipset connected m.2s. But then your stuck with trying to figure out how to secure the second GPU.

Idk check the manual

SLI isn't used in folding or any mining for that matter.
And to answer the question: yes you can run on lower speeds, you might loose some performance, but running 4x or higher should be OK, considering it'll run 4.0. Check manual for PCI-e/M.2 config @mattheginger