lol I don't believe it, posting works!

GPU2 client started working again less than a minute ago

That's very good, but I think it was just a coincidence.

Oh man what a shame. Intel motherboards with 4 PCI-E X16 slots are very expensive and few too choose from. AMD not too many to chose from that cost is OK, an MSI for $150. I don't want anymore AMD, but the quad core is only $150 too. 65watt processor, so they claim. Nice place to install 4 8800GS cards.

Too bad it requires Windows.

It's also now $130

It changed at midnight without warning, I couldn't believe it.

And at noon today it was $99.

Is this a video card or a gallon of gasoline?

Now it's $120.

Anyone care to bet where it goes next?

Its still $119.

Actually the king of efficiency is the 8800GT with 256MB. Its not common, NewEgg has none, and Tiger has 1 at $130, one on Amazon over $200, and very few on Ebay.

I look at the Tiger $30 premium (this card should be $100) and the break even point in electrical savings is like 2.5 years. Too bad.

I look at the extra memory as insurance against the folding core's memory requirements growing in the future.

Actually when looking at PPW on the same GPU but with different amounts of memory the one with the smaller amount comes out more efficient. The problem with that scenario is that it is difficult to find 8800GT cards with just 256MB memory, most have 512MB. This according to the info from the folding forum.

I actually have a pair of XFX 256MB 8800GT's (UK web site) which I've added a pair of Accelero S1 rev2's to.

The major problem is that, contrary to what I've read elsewhere, the speed of GDDR does make a difference, which is seemingly more noticeable at lower speeds. The cards I have default to a quite pathetic effective 1400MHz each but raising this to 1500MHz cuts frame times by up to ~10s!

The minor problem is GPU squealing, although I found that a bit of blu-tack stuck over the 'no-pcie-power-cable-connected-speaker' (don't ask) has reduced that to a more bearable level.

The total power draw is roughly ~195w for an E7200 @2GHz @0.784v and 2 * 256MB 8800GT's @ 687/752 (core/mem) which is giving, currently, 9,700ppd. However, I'm still fine tuning this hence my erratic ppd.

It seems people over at the folding forums are making headway at running the GPU folding client in Wine. This post has good instructions for how to get it running. It's quite involved though: Install CUDA, download and compile a wrapper for the CUDA calls that'll help wine, and then install the GPU client. It might well take a few special settings for wine as well, but when it's working it seems to give a 10-20% performance improvement over using the same client in WinXP.

To me it looks like a similar situation to when the SMP client came out, but with the roles of windows and linux reversed (back then the linux SMP client was faster than the windows one, even if run in a virtual machine under windows).

AMD Black Edition at 2.6(stock) + 1 8800GTS G92 - 110 watts + 85 watts = 195 watts.

AMD Black Edition at 2.8 + 1 8800GS - 110 watts + 45 watts = 155 watts.

And it's RMA time!

I'm lost trying to follow the thread about making it all work in Linux, so until they can create a self-installing package I don't see myself even attempting that. Besides in Linux-talk "untar the file" means, find the tool, download it, install it, then use it. There's just way too much assumned to be of any use to me. Other than being stable I can't say I will miss Ubuntu on pc #2.