I need a project...

[RP]

I feel like my investment in Folding hardware hasn't yet hit it's "hope the wife doesn't ask any questions" point, so there might be room for future project. Question is, what...

 

A - All business, bang for buck working horse with whatever GPU makes the most economical sense. No particular effords made towards noise dampening or "bling"

B - Little box of tricks, something along the lines of a GTX 1070 shorty in a mini-ITX case.

C - Something very silent, passive this, passive that. 

 

Any thoughts - or plans you guys are working on? 

[skimmilk5]

Find something QUIET. Anything QUIET. Folding@Home and BOINC will all use whatever power is available to them to solve tasks given to them. You could run it on some old crappy laptop and a gaming desktop, and it would simply adapt the task to best suit the CPU and GPU power available to them.

The GeForce GTX 750, GeForce GTX 950, Radeon R9 270, Radeon R7 360, and Radeon HD 6660 are all good cards. If you really want to benefit the community, you could use an Nvidia Quadro K---- or M---- card.

[Imakuni]

2 hours ago, kimsejin5 said:

If you really want to benefit the community, you could use an Nvidia Quadro K---- or M---- card.

Excuse me? Could you please tell one, just ONE DC project in which a quadro does better than an equally priced consumer card? Because I'm pretty sure that, while there are projects that can use such cards, they aren't particularly better than consumer ones.

 

2 hours ago, RP said:

Any thoughts - or plans you guys are working on? 

Assuming you don't do so already, the first step would be to let every computer on the house crunching 24/7. It's hardware you already own, unused potential waiting to be awakened. If noise is a concern, invest into better coolers for those machines; I couldn't sleep with my AMD stock fan, so I just bought a cheap Hyper TX3 and now it can't be heard.

 

Next on the list, upgrading systems parts rather than building new machines. Say, you still have a Pentium E2180 like I do: swap it all for a new Skylake platform. Or you use a Radeon HD 4550 just to power a display on an HP's machine: get rid of it and put something more modern (also take the chance to upgrade your crap HP PSU to a decent gold rated one). All hail the energy efficiency!

 

Last, if you really don't have anything to upgrade, I suppose you could build an HTPC and let it crunch 24/7 rather than having it off most of the time. You should be able to find nice deals on used Gtx 970 and even 960, those will be powerful, affordable and won't draw ludicrous amounts of power, meaning you'll be able to cool them without too much noise.

[RP]

I have three rigs folding 24/7, currently producing 1.2m ppd, and besides upgrading the gpus in these, not much can or should be done. And where's the fun in that? :). I need something new to tinker with. 

[petem]

12 hours ago, RP said:

I feel like my investment in Folding hardware hasn't yet hit it's "hope the wife doesn't ask any questions" point, so there might be room for future project. Question is, what...

 

A - All business, bang for buck working horse with whatever GPU makes the most economical sense. No particular effords made towards noise dampening or "bling"

B - Little box of tricks, something along the lines of a GTX 1070 shorty in a mini-ITX case.

C - Something very silent, passive this, passive that. 

 

Any thoughts - or plans you guys are working on? 

Ubuntu file server/media server/seed box (or whatever you are in dire need of would like to add to your corral) with a 1070 shorty mini-itx - that would be suhweeet 

[RP]

A specific project, became "a box to tinker with" - so my Cooler Master HAF Cube, along with an Asrock Z97 Extreme 4 and a EVGA GQ 750 will become the base of a machine, that I can switch GPUs in and out of, depending on what I run into in the local classifieds. 

 

The first hit was a pair of 6 month old Strix 970's for 300 euro (about half price), but they are currently lost in shipping. Sender is fighting that battle, and I have no money lost. So had to find something else, couldn't stand having a machine just standing on a table, without a "heart".

 

Tried a Asus Direct CU II 780, and it is munching wall power now,  producing 200-220k ppd. A Strix 960 is on the way, so the team should end up making roughly 400k ppd. Both cards cost me 110euro each. Shouldn't have too much trouble reselling - which will be the philosophy of this rig. Buy, try and sell. Al whilst folding.

[straight_stewie]

On 7/22/2016 at 8:21 AM, RP said:

I feel like my investment in Folding hardware hasn't yet hit it's "hope the wife doesn't ask any questions" point, so there might be room for future project. Question is, what...

 

A - All business, bang for buck working horse with whatever GPU makes the most economical sense. No particular effords made towards noise dampening or "bling"

B - Little box of tricks, something along the lines of a GTX 1070 shorty in a mini-ITX case.

C - Something very silent, passive this, passive that. 

 

Any thoughts - or plans you guys are working on? 

I feel like A and C are contradictory statements. That said, you should pick a minimum FLOPS rating (or cost), then take all the graphics cards above (or below if you used cost) that, and calculate their FLOPS/Watt ratio. Pick the one with the highest ratio. The recurring cost of electricity is what's going to let the wifey get you. I looked for a list of GPUs by FLOPS/Watt, but I couldn't find anything newer than Maxwell 1