Observations on Efficiency

[Gorgon]

Folding long term one starts to think about efficiency and what is the best card for folding or the "sweet spot".

I don't have any AMD cards to compare and was deeply disappointed that Navi won't fold yet given the performance Vega showed in Folding and BOINC and the promise the move to 7nm should show to power efficiency.

So I'm looking purely at the NVidia cards I have and how they've been performing over the last 2 weeks. Granted this is a both a worst and best-case performance as they are all running at their maximum power limits with high fan speeds and their maximum stable GPU overclock rather than lower power-limits where the cards should be much more power efficient.

I'm going to look at 2 views of efficiency; Power Efficiency (kPPD/W) and Cost Efficiency (kPPD/$). These numbers were collected over two weeks using a Zabbix Server monitoring the systems using custom scripts where necessary polling the systems once per minute.

Here are the results for the RTX 2060 Super:

Can you spot where this slot was stuck Downloading?

 

Here is a summary of the results:

 

It would appear that the RTX 2060 Super is the most cost efficient card looking at the purchase price but many of the older Pascal cards can likely be procured used at lower prices and the prices I've used are what I paid for the cards new.

The higher end cards are also more power efficient. I've summed the two efficiency values but there likely should be a weighting on each but that would be very subjective.

The 2070 Super Hybrids while having a price premium do manage to boost up to a higher Graphics Clock at a lower overclock than the air cooled card.

Of the two GTX 1060 cards both are 6GB variants, the first a SC Short-Board variant running in a Windows 10 system that is my daily driver. The Second is an SSC ACX3.0 variant that while significantly more expensive does not produce more PPD even in a Linux system though this card is installed in a PCIe2 x4 slot connected to the B450 Chipset.