Motherboard recommendations

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quest_for_silence
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Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:12 am
Location: ITALY

Motherboard recommendations

Post by quest_for_silence » Wed Oct 19, 2011 12:33 am

For several reason, I'm thinking to update the mobo of my folding Silverstone Raven, and for the first time I'm looking at CPU folding too.

So I'm wondering if there's anything similar to this dual AMD ASUS KCMA-D8, I mean dual socket/dual PCIE 8x slots, but for the Intel architecture, in order to exploit the higher efficiency of Santa Clara's products (and eventually justify the enormous cooling power of my ugly Raven: however, the expected power consumption of the AMD system should be under 400W).

Price should be - obviously? - similar (currently around 930 USD shipped for that mobo and two Opteron 4180, six cores@2,6GHz each), while the estimated PPD should be in excess of 62,000 PPD (Linux, A5).

quest_for_silence
Posts: 5275
Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:12 am
Location: ITALY

Re: Motherboard recommendations

Post by quest_for_silence » Wed Oct 19, 2011 1:58 am

I can answer by myself, I'm afraid: no dual sockets until LGA2011, for SB.

Any efficient current Xeon around, with a couple of PCIE x8 for GPUs?

The alternative is wondering: "to-AMD or not-to-AMD, this is the question..."

cordis
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Location: San Jose

Re: Motherboard recommendations

Post by cordis » Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:42 am

I think you can get more bang for the buck with a dual xeon board. Not sure how the latest of those are doing, but in previous reports I've read from people, the older ones can rack up in the hundred thousand ppd range, folding bigadv, of course. Usually wind up being pretty expensive, but they have amazing ppd/watt numbers, so if that's something you're worried about, I think xeons are supreme there. There might be some threads over in the hardware section of foldingforum.org, usually a good place to look.

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