Yeah, I have an HR-03 GT on a gtx 285, keeps it pretty cool, I've been able to overclock it from 650 to 715Mhz, probably gives it another 1000ppd. It's a big cooler, though, it'll cover about 4 slots with a fan on it. And it isn't listed as being 9800 compatible, so that's troubling. I think the t-rad2 is compatible, but more interesting is the thermalright spitfire. It has that different orientation where it winds up over the slots, but you could conceivably rotate it and get the orientation you wanted from your cooler mod. Might hit the motherboard though, so could be dangerous. But it's an interesting option.

OK so I went with the HR-03 GT and a 92mm Nexus fan (finally, I get to try one of them !!). Should be here by the end of the week and I'll be happily folding again !
For the moment, I'm just folding with SMP, getting about 500ppd (PC is off at night, the GPU is too noisy right now).

Aw, that's too bad, it's too noisy to leave it on at night? Oh well, back in production mode is a good thing.

In terms of production, there are a couple of new things that are knocking down ppd. I've seen a bunch of traffic that suggests that the new fermi compatible gpu core is slower on gtx 200 series cards, so I haven't upgraded to that. I've been hit in smp with a new A3 wu, 6701, that seems to be 30% or so less ppd than other A3 smp wus. There have also started generating A3 bigadv WUs, and those also seem to cut ppd by about 25%. Not sure what's going on over there lately, but it seems like there are a lot of new things that cut your ppd down, keep an eye on things but be prepared to see some random slowdowns. I've been OCing my systems as much as I can, and turning on extra gpus when I need to keep my production up, but it's become somewhat of a crapshoot.

http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/graphi ... r-ii-cards

The copper finned GTX470 looks great, I just wish it wasn't an MSI product. And I ain't paying an extra $100 for it either.

Speaking of the 470, do this card fold yet?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814127501

Prices are finally starting to slip down.

HR03-GT to be installed tomorrow
Folding to resume right after succesful stress tests !!!!!!

Hey, good news, hope the install goes smoothly. And yeah Aristide, glad to hear that those are coming down in cost, and that we're seeing some alternate heat sinks. I wonder how easy it would be to replace the fans on that msi version. I may have to pick up one of those if these smp/bigadv issues keep up.

Hey Cordis, just a quick question : It seems that you upgrade regularly so I'm curious as to what you do with your spare parts. The day you have a yard sale, I'm coming over just to see what hose Nvidia monsters look like outside of the box

Well, mostly they just stack up around my place. I'm really pretty bad about selling this stuff off. Hell, I should probably start posting in the for sale forum, but I dunno, too lazy. Most of the stuff I have sitting around is my lower powered stuff, so it's no big shakes per se, but it might find some buyers around here. But I really don't have too much, maybe 3 or 4 motherboards, a couple processors, a couple gtx 250s, a 9600 gso.

gtx250s... nice !

Back to folding on my GPU, now with a nexus 92mm at 12V on the HR-03 GT.

One of those 250s is pretty crappy, it used to error out on every 4th or so WU. Not very good. The other one is ok.

Finally some good hardware news from NVidia

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvid ... 00-king/16

Perhaps a good replacement for the 260.
Added - When I say as a replacement I meant as a alternative.
To physically replace a 260 getting 7000PPD with a 460 that gets 10,000PPD for the same wattage is not a great decision.
$200, about 120 more stream processors, more memory for a couple of bucks.
Low temps, reports about 10-20 fewer watts than a 260.
Two cards for $400 gets you 672 stream processors, way more than a GTX 480 for less money.
Quieter product.

Stream processor cost ($/SP)
460 - 59.2 cents/SP
465 - 71 cents/SP
470 - 73.6 cents/SP Updated 66 cents per latest NewEgg ad.
480 - $1/SP

Watts/SP per the article
480 - .877 watts/SP
470 - .817 watts/SP
465 - .99 watts/SP
460 - .82 watts/SP


So the last spec shows the 460 has the efficiency of the 470 at a lower startup cost.
It comes down to what you want to spend, how much heat you want to deal with, how many slots you have.

The Asus model has voltage tweak, leave the speeds alone and undervolt the sucker for more efficiency.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphi ... -review/11

I'll run the numbers from bit-tech later.

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=15196

Quote From the Stanford forums:
GTX 480 HC ----- 1802Mhz / 2002Mhz ------- 18,786.22 ---- (257.15 Beta)
Total System Wattage Peak: 879watts (SLI GTX 480's & 980X @ 4.6GHz)
18,786.22x2 / 879 = 42.74 PPD per Watt

GTX 480 HC ----- 1789Mhz / 2124Mhz ------- 18,173.8 ---- (257.15 Beta)
Total System Wattage Peak: 857watts (SLI GTX 480's & 980X @ 4.6GHz)
18,173.8x2 / 857 = 42.41 PPD per Watt

GTX 480 HC ----- 1644Mhz / 2048Mhz ------- 16,470 ---- (257.15 Beta)
Total System Wattage Peak: 789watts (SLI GTX 480's & 980X @ 4.6GHz)
16,470x2 / 789 = 41.74 PPD per Watt

End quote.

PPD is good but it's no Intel 32nm hex core. IE I can't get too excited about it. Also mentioned is that anything that uses 100% CPU will lower your PPD. No mention how much CPU the GPU is utilizing.

Great, looks like the reviews are good, I may have to pick up one of these things. Wonder how quiet they are. I've heard that the new gpu tool version works, but I'm not sure if they have it working on linux yet. Eh, I'll wait and see if anyone on the folding forum gets any results, and do the math from there.

800 Watts !!! Ouch !!! I wonder what kind of aftermarket cooling people will come up with. With those temps, you're going to need a lot of moving air to keep a setup like that cool. With a 800W microwave, you heat up a cup of water in about 2 minutes...

Can't wait to see numbers for a smaller setup, it still looks interesting.

EVGA, the usual warranty champ for video cards, is really scaling back with the 460. Just 2 years. Even Asus offers 3 years.

It's 2 years only for certain 460 cards, the others have the usual lifetime warranty.

I dunno, they'll be obsolete in two years anyway. I've only been folding (and buying big video cards) for a year and a couple months, and all my gtx 200s are now eclipsed by the 400s. Oh well.

No disagreement there but 32nm quads are nowhere to be found, and $1K for the hex is too much for what it is. Which is why Intel had record setting profits this past quarter.

Yeah, I keep hearing about a cheaper hex core showing up at some point. But it may wind up being for the 1156 socket or something, not sure if it will be too slow or not. It was funny, Fry's had an add for a sale a few weeks back where they described the price for an i7 980x as "too low to print!" Doubt it.

In other news, I'm off on a business trip next week, so if my production falls off a cliff, don't worry, it was just a rolling blackout that hit while I was gone.

Darn thunderstorm yesterday night. No power for a few hours...

Hey, look what popped up today:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/19/intels-3-2ghz-hexacore-i7-970-now-shipping/

and at such a huge discount! Well, it drops the price point and the overclockers will probably get it above the i7 980x anyway, so I guess it's good for them. If the price difference were a little bigger, it might be useful, but as it is, meh.

I just noticed that on july 22nd, we had a big spike in production : 540 000 (instead of the usual ~230 000)
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ ... s=&t=31574


Oh and I made it to the top 5 of SCPR producers today.

Yeah, on the 22nd there were some smp jobs that they hadn't been giving people points for, so they figured out what they owed and updated everybody that day. It's fun to take a look at some other people scores, and you can see from them who was running smp and who wasn't. So yeah, just one of those things.

And hey, congrats on making it into the top 5! Very nice!

hahaha, I'm now n°4, only 30 000 points behind Kansakilla.... I guess I won't be catching up with you guys aby time soon

Yeah, it's funny, just under KansaKilla there's that pack of you (frenchie), Thorsted, Aristide1, and SebRad, all right around 7.7k ppd. I'm kind of amazed that you're all so clustered together, do you all have the same hardware? In that group, it's anyone's chance to pull ahead, just a slightly faster gpu or cpu would do it for you. But in the meantime, you'll all be in the pack!

When I can get a decent core 2 quad core for cheap, I might jump in the list

Darn, Aristide is 4 points above me today !

[EDIT : just looked at core 2 quad prices... holy crap... I was thinking prices were going to go down with the new i5/i7 comming out, but I guess not Oh well ! ]

Hey, I finally got my big case mod done (check out the 'big brass box' general gallery thread for the details), so I have more time for normal maintenance stuff. So Frenchie, if you want a core 2 quad, I may be able to pull one out of an old rig, give you a good deal on it.

But it looks like you dropped off the map there, what's up?

Well, good news. After several years of being idle, I'm back (and folding under a new name for numerous reasons). My last machine, an X2, was barely fast enough for my encoding load, and that has since gotten even bigger. So big, in fact, that the SMP client isn't even worth running on my i7--I am probably barely going to finish the one WU I started before the deadline.

However, several other things have changed that allow me to fold again. First, my machine is finally stable enough that I can even consider it, thanks to BIOS updates. Secondly, my last GPU, an x1950 Pro (IIRC), was only able to fold for a short time before the GPU client for it became obsolete. Now that I have a 5850, I should be able to fold on it 24/7 during the cooler months (probably 8 months out of the year). The 13% CPU it uses shouldn't drastically affect encoding, and the PPD is several orders of magnitude higher than the CPU folder. So, I should be getting ~3K PPD to donate to the team during fall, winter, and spring.

It's good to be back.

Hey, welcome back! Just out of curiosity, which i7 do you have? I'm usually getting around 10k on mine. I guess it depends on how long you have your machine on and what other stuff you run. But however you want to do it, keep on folding!

Thanks! I have the Lynnfield 860...it's in my sig, but the font is a little small, I'll go fix that after I finish this post.

The bigger problem is running x264 at the same time just cripples the SMP client. Also, FahSpy can't seem to figure out what the credit for the WU is--this one WU was at ~1100, now it reports 481, and its been various numbers (all since around 400-500) over time. Still, barely making the deadline is not something I like to do, and with the size of the SMP WUs, chances are I'll be doing a lot of encoding while they are running. None of the WUs for SMP clients are small enough to pick up for 8-12 hours and be done with them, as the GPU WUs are. Oh well.

That's a shame, I have an i7 860 too, and it's usually pretty fast. It's currently working on a WU that looks like it will take about 6.5 hours, which puts the ppd at around 12k ppd. I have that in my htpc, so there are some occasional cpu consuming tasks, and that ppd level doesn't generally hold up, but I'm surprised that you're close to missing deadlines on SMP jobs. The encoding you're doing must be sucking up some serious cpu cycles.

As far as fahspy goes, it's important if you do do any SMP folding to get a monitoring program that can take bonuses into account. I use HFM.net, it seems to do pretty well. Not sure if fahspy can deal with bonuses, but it's worth checking. It's also a good idea to get a passkey for your account if you don't have one, even if you're not doing smp folding. If they ever add a bonus program to gpu folding, it would be a good idea to have one. Just a suggestion. But regardless, keep on folding!