http://www.anandtech.com/show/3691/bios ... nd-bioking

Interesting board but if you think the PCI-E spacing leaves something to be desired then wait until you see how many lanes are in each one:

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/con ... p?S_ID=482

16/16/4/1

What the hell is that?

Hey, check out this workstation:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3693/supermicro-to-expand-their-gpu-servers-to-include-fermilevel-tesla

If you look at that tower, looks like dual xeon and quad fermis! Now that's a folding system right there. Sadly, I'm sure it sounds like a vacuum cleaner.

OMG, the fans on that "blade" are probably 60mm fans, but it's conceivable for them to be 40's as well. They're probably Deltas or Sunons. Check out the pudgy short fellas here:
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/50milfan.html

Do you really want multiple fans that spin faster than your hard drive?
I count 16 visible fans.

Madness.

Here's another graph of how the GTX480 is stacking up.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-g ... -review/26

OK, so 3 cards consume over a kilowatt on this setup.

Note/Quote: "Our test system is a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.75 GHz. "

However what we do see is the difference between a single GTX480 idle and fully loaded to be only 214 watts. GTX470 numbers are typically 30-40 watts lower.

This site also talks about how to overvolt these cards, which is useful because you should be able to undervolt them using the same methods.

Meanwhile here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom-ii ... t-review/5
AMD hex core power consumption looks good compared to the 965.
Note - the 965 is a quad at a higher frequency.

A new milestone

We surpassed 250,000 hits on this thread

Finally, I can use all those watts on my 1KW PSU !!
JK

but I DO want one of those GT240 nvidias (to replace a 6800GS )!!

Good find, that looks like a card that could be close to tolerably quiet. Now all we need is an updated gpu client that can handle fermi hardware....

So check this out....

I told y'all that I'm moving hardware over to both of my offices because I am going to lose the apartment where I've had two boxes folding along for the past year or so.

I got an ASUS P5N-D to recycle the Q9650 and move two 9800 GTs into. PCI slots are close together. Even though the cards are EE editions from Zotac (no external PCI-E plug), with stock cooling they were running in the 70's. Since the office they are in is now "Leed's Silver Certified" the AC is turned off at night. Made me a little uncomfortable, cause I'm sure the temps got over that overnight.

So, I bought another two Accelero S1's. I've got one on a regular 9800 GT (not the EE edition) and it's been folding nonstop at around 40 degrees passively. That's right. Passively, all the live long day.

OK, so on Wednesday night I installed those suckers. Did it the same way that I've always done it, even looked at the instructions to refresh my memory (this makes 5 that I've installed to date) and followed it to the letter. Tight fit in this board, but they will fit with millimeters to spare. No fans on the top card, of course.

Start folding. Temps start out in the 50's idle. IDLE. Crap, maybe stacked on on top of another is a bad thing, I dunno. Add a fan in front of the setup. One degree difference, maybe. Okay, what does it top out at? How about 95-99 degrees. WTF!?! It actually folds for a whole WU. I'm not kidding here. Tried everything, fans, case side off, etc. No real difference. Shit, I'm not gonna burn down the place for a few points so I turn off GPU clients for the night and go home.

Yesterday I thought about it some more, and took out the top card, disassembled it, and guess what. Less than 1/4 of the die made contact, and probably then because I had to angle it to get it free. The spacers are too big, so I took them off and just screwed the thing down by itself with no spacers. Bent the frame a little, but I didn't have an exacto knife or sandpaper or a file to whittle them down. Tested it, idle temps in the high 30-low 40 range. Folding full bore passively got to around 60 yesterday. No fan. Changed the other one, same story.

Two main thoughts here. If you are using the EE 9800GT editions or similar, be careful about die contact and the Accelero S1. Second, I can't believe that the card didn't die, and still folded a work unit at almost 100 degrees C. That's nuts.

Next step is to add a slim fan to the bottom cooler (12mm thick 120mm scythe or nexus or whatever) and see if I can lower the temps on both cards a little more. It's in a NSK4400B (I know, I know). Could get an Antec 300 for $50, but that's one more case with no place to put the old one.

Later,
KK

Nice work KK.

Thin enough?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185137

There's also an 800 RPM version, which I don't think could blow out a birth candle.

This offers some attachment alternatives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185073

Also:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185071

You get the idea.

Hey, just saw this over on anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3707/inno3d-announce-triple-slot-gtx-470-hawk-

Finally, a non-reference cooler, that should be quieter.

And hey, KK, had some experiences just like that last night. I moved my fast linux system into my modded case, and then moved my fast windows 7 system into the vacated fortress ft02. The fast windows 7 system has a gtx 285 with a big thermalright cooler on it, so I always expect it to be cool, and in the fortress I figured I could OC it even more. Imagine my surprise when I start folding on it and almost immediately my machine crashes! Ultimately, I found out that the fan on the heat sink was hooked up to the connector for the 3 big fans at the bottom, and that was hooked up to nothing. Once the fans got spinning again, I was able to get up to 715Mhz and keep the chip around 70, so I may push it even more. While my fast linux box (44kppd) is out of commision, I've got all my other machines going full blast to compensate, so I need all the gpus going strong.

For SMP I have bigworkunits on and -advmethods set, but I still don't get any SMP work units.

thanks, aris--i'll hook up with one of those nifty low-profile fans. what kind of cpu are you using with the bigadv workunits?

cordis--i've done that whole "forget to hook up the fans" thing before. good to know that you've got it going now. but does 70'C seem to hot to you?

I'm finally regularly getting SMP units that do not crash, on both machines... Yay!

KK - Nah, 70 is just fine, lately it's been in the high 60s. It used to run in the 80s in the old case.

aristide1 & Neil - Yeah, I've been having some smp trouble lately now, not sure what is up. One of my machines has actaully thrown up the windows error report on FahCore_a3.exe, I've never seen that happen before. I also just had my fast windows machine get an old A0 wu, right after I upgraded it to an i7 930. Gah. And my fast linux box has been up and down while I've been modding the case and adding hard drives, I tried upgrading it to Ubuntu 10.04, but the installer kept crashing, drove me nuts. I finally just went back to 9.04, that seems to work. No idea what's up with 10.04 not being able to install. Eh, ah well, one of these days I'll get everything back to normal.

I wish I could say that.

About once a month, my main machine used to hang because of the SMP process... I added 2 notches to the CPU voltage and I haven't seen a problem in a while.

Hey, it looks like my i7 860 is folding again, so all my smp systems seem to be going again. Good times! And good timing too:

http://en.fah-addict.net/news/news-0-224+smp2-migration-begins.php

So be sure you're up to date, A3 WUs will start becoming the norm.

Hey Cordis, what ever happened to your 100K spikes? The team seems to be sputtering out as of late.

Uh, Aristide, wha? Take a look:

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=452724

So, twice in the last 3 days. There were a few days there when I had my big system shut down for my big case mod, but now that the wiring has been optimized I should be able to keep it running while I get to work on the case walls. Yeah, I've noticed the drop off lately, but it does seem to be turning around a little, KansaKilla is back above 40k, so that's cool. Our big loss lately has been Lockheed, from 30k or so down to nothing. Hope everything's OK Lockheed.

Cordis,

Of course you're right. Some of the big team spikes aren't as abig anymore.

Hmm i was wondering. Folding stresses gpu/cpu. That means more noise. Does someone have some pics of their folding rigs?

Well, BlackWhizz, I put up some pics of my machines here:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=57386&sid=a11a05b0223a3cb441606fbc581dd780

Although I should really update that thread, I've upgraded many of the machines to i7s and I'm working on a case mod for my big producer system. But ideally, folding on cpus (smp folding) is much easier to keep quiet, get a nice cooler and a quiet fan and it's not hard at all to keep that quiet. I have a couple of megahalems, a scythe mugen 2, and a couple noctua tower coolers, with scythe or nexus fans on those, a decent case, and that's very quiet. With gpus, it can be harder, I've got a big aftermarket cooler on a gtx285, and that's pretty quiet. I've mostly moved away from doing a lot of gpu folding just because of the noise reasons, and because the efficiency of those hasn't kept up with cpu efficiency. For the noisier gpus, you can also use better cases and keep them further away from you. But really, isn't it too easy to keep a low power system quiet? Keeping a high power system quiet, that's a challenge.

HFV 0.5.0 - Revision 180 now avaialble for download.

http://code.google.com/p/hfm-net/downloads/list

Woohoo! I just got 5,009 points for a single work unit! Project 6041 seems to be a biggun' -- unless that is my bonus points getting added?

Yeah, anything with a number that odd like 5009 is probably an added bonus. Nice, eh?

I've been loking around the web without much success, so I'll ask you guys and girls : how do I figure out how many A3 units I've already completed ? I can't find it in FahMon and I downloaded HFM but I can't find it there either... I'm just eagerly waiting for a bonus

There's no obvious way to find out. There used to be a thread over in foldingforum.org where you could ask and some guy could tell you, but I can't find it now. All you can really do is just make sure your passkey is the same for all your rigs, and wait.

darn !
Thanks Cordis. I'll just wait until I see a spike in ppd... hopefully...

If your log files are intact you can search them for core a3.

From a command line in your FAH folder

type fahlog.txt | find "FahCore_a3.exe"
type fahlog-prev.txt | find "FahCore_a3.exe"

The number of complete A3 WUs will usually be the number of times you see "Core required: FahCore_a3.exe" minus one.