What is the cost effective PC for folding?

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ColdFlame
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What is the cost effective PC for folding?

Post by ColdFlame » Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:05 am

I've been folding and doing measurements on different platforms regarding folding performance.

It seems that p4 has an upper hand in folding, especially with HT technology. I don't remember how many PPD David is getting on his p4s but he gets a lot :)

p4 is however very expensive and I'm not going that route.

My current candidates are either AMD 2500 Barton or a cheap Celeron. I got my Celeron combo (CPU+motherboard) at Fry's for $60, you can add a 256 MB DDR PC2700 for $20 and have a working core of your computer for $80. I also spent $50 on HS+fan+AS4.

Overclocking potential of Celerons is huge IMHO and most of them can be taken to about 3 GHz which would equal 90-100 PPD. I don't know how much you can get out of Barton. I wonder how this compares to something like p4 2.6 which can be had for $220 (CPU only).

Zyzzyx
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Post by Zyzzyx » Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:27 am

What is the cost effective PC for folding?
Someone else's.

DryFire
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Post by DryFire » Mon Dec 01, 2003 3:34 pm

probably something like the amd tbred for like $50 and some mother board for $40-50 with 256mb of ram runnning linux and set to lan boot F@H.

I'm always skeptical of celerons but they may be good foling boxes.

haysdb
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Post by haysdb » Mon Dec 01, 2003 7:05 pm

ColdFlame,

We essentially asked the same question at about the same time in different threads.

As posted in the other thread, it looks like a motherboard with integrated video and LAN can be had for $50 to $60. An Athlon 1800+ Thoroughbred (T-bred) is $50 or a 2500+ Barton is $85. 256MB of DDR333 memory is $40, or if you are on a really tight budget, 128MB of DDR266 Kingston ValueRAM is $22. And so it goes. I am in the process of figuring this out myself.

I haven't put a pencil to what each of my machines produce, but each of my three P4's are running at 2.5MHz and above, so you'd EXPECT them to produce a lot. I thought the Athlons were supposed to be the overachievers of the Folding world?

David

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