Building a folding rig, help needed

[Gazereths]

I've been wanting to build a special folding rig for a while now as a new project as I love getting into new things and building PC's. I'd like some advice regarding what parts I have and what parts I need:

 

Parts I have:

• Asrock H81 Pro BTC motherboard with support for up to 6 gpu's
• 2 HD6870 GPU's
• 8 gigs of DDR3 (if I can get away with 4gigs I'll buy some more as I'd have to scrounge the 8gigs from my gaming rig)
• Loads of old fans
• Aluminium plate and angle to build the framework

Parts I know I need:

• 1150 CPU
• PSU capable of powering 6 6870's
• PCIe risiers

Part's I don't know I need:

• ??????????????

Part's I want:

• 4 more 6870 GPU's as I think they are the best value second hand GPU's atm.

Dream parts:

• Water cooling blocks etc for 6 GPU's and CPU

 

 

Questions?:

 

• Is there a single PSU out there that doesn't cost the Earth that will power 6 x 6870's or equivalent?
• Are 6870's even plausible for folding?
• Can I cheap out on a CPU?
• I know nothing about risers, can you help me out? My MOBO has one 16x slot and five 1x slots

 

Budget:

 

• Would like to spend as little as possible obviously, but am not bothered about dropping some serious coin on a decent PSU, as long as it's not crazy money.

 

 

 

Any and all replies are most welcome guys :):)

 

 

 

[Epiclol86]

hem... 6x6870's ? where are you getting those? anyways their power consumtion at load is about 250 watts... no power supply can provide enough power for this!

[Gazereths]

4 minutes ago, Epiclol86 said:

hem... 6x6870's ? where are you getting those? anyways their power consumtion at load is about 250 watts... no power supply can provide enough power for this!

Ebay bro Got one that was 'untested' but works for £10, got the other for £30....I low ball every 'best offer' I see....Bargain hunter

 

So 4 or 5 6870's  on a single PSU would be plausible then? as that would be 1000-1250W. I'm not beyond getting two PSU's if that's needed.

[Epiclol86]

Just now, Gazereths said:

Ebay bro Got one that was 'untested' but works for £10, got the other for £30....Bargain hunter

 

So 4 or 5 6870's  on a single PSU would be plausible then? as that would be 1000-1250W. I'm not beyond getting two PSU's if that's needed.

i think your best bet would be getting 2 750's to get a total of 1500. (you may want a bit morepower that just the total power of GPU's...) you could get two EVGA's 750 B2 for about 130 pounds. i think it would work and since they are semi modular you get enough 6 pin connectors to power everything!

[Gazereths]

9 minutes ago, Epiclol86 said:

i think your best bet would be getting 2 750's to get a total of 1500. (you may want a bit morepower that just the total power of GPU's...) you could get two EVGA's 750 B2 for about 130 pounds. i think it would work and since they are semi modular you get enough 6 pin connectors to power everything!

Hmmm yeah that's possibly the best bet, I  could get a single 750W to get it up and running with the 2 6870's that I have, then add more later on as I get more. I recently saw or read (can't remember) a tut on getting two PSU's to power up at the same time, which would be advantageous.

 

It still leaves the question of the CPU, could a cheapo 1150 Haswell like a celeron manage? I know a celeron or pentium would get swamped gaming but does folding have the same limitations?

[Epiclol86]

1 minute ago, Gazereths said:

Hmmm yeah that's possibly the best bet, I  could get a single 750W to get it up and running with the 2 6870's that I have, then add more later on as I get more. I recently saw or read (can't remember) a tut on getting two PSU's to power up at the same time, which would be advantageous.

 

It still leaves the question of the CPU, could a cheapo 1150 Haswell like a celeron manage? I know a celeron or pentium would get swamped gaming but does folding have the same limitations?

F@H uses all cpu cores, so using a pentium (which has 2 cores) is not the best. try getting at least a quad core. something you might be able to find is a good deal for a used xeon...

[Epiclol86]

thanks bro

 

(i try to be friendly from time to time...)

[Gazereths]

5 hours ago, Epiclol86 said:

F@H uses all cpu cores, so using a pentium (which has 2 cores) is not the best. try getting at least a quad core. something you might be able to find is a good deal for a used xeon...

Yeah but the price of 1150 quads is mad, I just need to know if 2 or 4 cores or 4 cores plus HT will have any advantage or disadvantage for this project.

 

Xeons that fit the 1150 socket are expensive so it'll have to be i3/i5, which are also expensive (thanks Intel for not improving your CPU's enough for the old models to drop in price significantly since about 2010????).......i3 with HT seems best to me. Still I'd like conformation from someone that cores matter, I somehow recall during the cryptocoin mining rush that CPU's were a minor concern compared to gpu's

 

[Epiclol86]

4 minutes ago, Gazereths said:

Yeah but the price of 1150 quads is mad, I just need to know if 2 or 4 cores or 4 cores plus HT will have any advantage or disadvantage for this project.

 

Xeons that fit the 1150 socket are expensive so it'll have to be i3/i5, which are also expensive (thanks Intel for not improving your CPU's enough for the old models to drop in price significantly since about 2010????).......i3 with HT seems best to me. Still I'd like conformation from someone that cores matter, I somehow recall during the cryptocoin mining rush that CPU's were a minor concern compared to gpu's

 

well, i don't know much about bitcoin mining and such but i know folding at home is using these cores. (according to the F@H website: "V7 was designed to utilize multiple CPU cores with a multi-cored CPU slot (formerly SMP slot) and a GPU slot for each supported GPU. "). but you can still use a single core of your cpu, after a bit of configuring (again according to them. i can't link to another website here it would be breaking the rules). so it's your choice really, any cpu will handle it, but each thread added will multiply the folding performance from your cpu.

[Gazereths]

Just now, Epiclol86 said:

well, i don't know much about bitcoin mining and such but i know folding at home is using these cores. (according to the F@H website: "V7 was designed to utilize multiple CPU cores with a multi-cored CPU slot (formerly SMP slot) and a GPU slot for each supported GPU. "). but you can still use a single core of your cpu, after a bit of configuring (again according to them. i can't link to another website here it would be breaking the rules). so it's your choice really, any cpu will handle it, but each thread added will multiply the folding performance from your cpu.

Hmmm so from what you are saying each GPU needs a core of it's own? So if i want 6 GPU's I'll need a quad with HT?

 

So it comes down to and i7/xeon with 6 cheap GPUS, or an i3/5 with four GPUS..........I just really wanted to populate all the slots of the motherboard I have without spending too much on a cpu.

 

I wish there were LGA775 or 771 motherboards that supported load's of GPUS, I've got some decent quad core 771 and 775 Xeons that would do the job nicely.

[Epiclol86]

Just now, Gazereths said:

Hmmm so from what you are saying each GPU needs a core of it's own? So if i want 6 GPU's I'll need a quad with HT?

 

So it comes down to and i7/xeon with 6 cheap GPUS, or an i3/5 with four GPUS..........I just really wanted to populate all the slots of the motherboard I have without spending too much on a cpu.

 

I wish there were LGA775 or 771 motherboards that supported load's of GPUS, I've got some decent quad core 771 and 775 Xeons that would do the job nicely.

nooooo no no no no no no. you could run the six cards with a single core cpu, that's not a problem (just make sure it's got enough pci-e lanes though). it's just that the cpu will use as much cores (or threads) as it can equally. so the the folding power coming from your cpu (and your cpu only) is multiplied by the number of threads

[tobben]

31 minutes ago, Epiclol86 said:

nooooo no no no no no no. you could run the six cards with a single core cpu.

That depends on the card vendor and specific wu in question. 
Some use alot of cpu overhead these days. My 3770k is pinned 
at 25% right now.

 

For scale, 15-20% of that is a core 18 project on the 970, the core 21

on the 7950 on the other hand is sitting at about 0.2-0.4%, the rest

is miscellaneous. 

 

This is mostly a nvidia phenomenon as far as i am aware.

[Epiclol86]

5 minutes ago, tobben said:

That depends on the card vendor and specific wu in question. 
Some use alot of cpu overhead these days. My 3770k is pinned 
at 25% right now.

 

For scale, 15-20% of that is a core 18 project on the 970, the core 21

on the 7950 on the other hand is sitting at about 0.2-0.4%, the rest

is miscellaneous. 

 

This is mostly a nvidia phenomenon as far as i am aware.

yhea, in that case they are HD 6870's, and i was talking about F@H. I'm pretty sure it could work. But you bring up and interesting point, since nobody really experimented with this hardware i think, OP would be going in this "never explored before" terrain where anything could happen since it was never tested out by the manufacturer that Linus talked about on the 30000 $ rig teardown stream. He could bring up wierd problems doing his project indeed i think!

[Gazereths]

1 hour ago, Epiclol86 said:

nooooo no no no no no no. you could run the six cards with a single core cpu, that's not a problem (just make sure it's got enough pci-e lanes though). it's just that the cpu will use as much cores (or threads) as it can equally. so the the folding power coming from your cpu (and your cpu only) is multiplied by the number of threads

From the very limited knowledge I have the CPU's folding capability is negligible compared to the GPU's anyway, so any CPU that makes the system work would be OK?

52 minutes ago, tobben said:

That depends on the card vendor and specific wu in question. 
Some use alot of cpu overhead these days. My 3770k is pinned 
at 25% right now.

 

For scale, 15-20% of that is a core 18 project on the 970, the core 21

on the 7950 on the other hand is sitting at about 0.2-0.4%, the rest

is miscellaneous. 

 

This is mostly a nvidia phenomenon as far as i am aware.

TBH a lot of that made  little sense to me (obviously my fault due to ignorance)

 

I suppose my real question is would  a cheapo 1150 CPU, like a celeron or pentium, hinder the performance of the multiple GPU's ability to fold effectively and efficiently?

[Epiclol86]

5 minutes ago, Gazereths said:

From the very limited knowledge I have the CPU's folding capability is negligible compared to the GPU's anyway, so any CPU that makes the system work would be OK?

TBH a lot of that made  little sense to me (obviously my fault due to ignorance)

 

I suppose my real question is would  a cheapo 1150 CPU, like a celeron or pentium, hinder the performance of the multiple GPU's ability to fold effectively and efficiently?

well, it really depends on what cpu. There is a limit of how sucky the cpu can be without "bottlenecking" (in this case it's not technically bottlenecking but let's call it this) hindering all the gpu's capability. A GPU will use a certain portion of your cpu's capability, and not having enough cpu capability can hinder the performance of your overall system by not allowing your gpu's to reach full potential. But there is no way i can help you in finding about this. I don't think you can find how much cpu percentage per core a 6870 uses on the internet, so what i suggest you do is try one of those and see how much cpu it uses, then scale it up to 6 times. Taking in account the cpu you use to test will certainly be more powerfull than the one you will be using, try and make a better estimate of how much cpu you need. then make a decision!

 

(if you don't understand, just ask me questions, i'll be there for a few more hours, i got a lot of work to do

[Madone6]

SLI/Crossfire doesnt work with folding AFAIK

[FloRolf]

Protip: just use your 980 for folding

- less power consumption

- less money spent

- better performance

 

Even if you only fold half the day on your 980 you probably get a higher ppd than with 6 6870.