Shooting for a billion

Hello, as I introduced myself in at the welcome mat, I want to get serious into folding as a contribution to the world and to the forums ranking

I would like to farm out a few GTX1070s and just let them rip. I dont believe you can beat the Price vs PPD with these in the current market. (feel free to prove me wrong!)

The 1070 I have listed in my sig churns out ~700k when left alone. I am running 2 cores from the CPU and that bumps the PPD readout to a "meh" ~720k. Seems CPUs were left in the dust in terms of folding power.

I have a couple questions with regards to CPU/MOBO
-Is PCIe 4x a bottleneck at all or focus on 8x min?
-Is there any CPU worth folding with? If I need 8x8x8x for 3 in a box Ill need to look at another 2011v3 chip that will have 28 lanes available.

Trying to absorb as much info before pulling the trigger on hardware. Any build advice would be appreciated!

Howdy and Welcome to the Fold (sheep humor )
8x is about the min to fold with, as for CPU, unless you have a 64 core server, no folding.

Check out my Folding build here My New Folding Build

In fairness my Ryzen 7 is moderately worth it to fold on... Adds about 50k estimated PPD to my RX480. Then again electricity is free in the house my wife and I live in... At least free for us.

Bluefalcon13 said:

In fairness my Ryzen 7 is moderately worth it to fold on... Adds about 50k estimated PPD to my RX480. Then again electricity is free in the house my wife and I live in... At least free for us.

Click to expand...

Oh yea, forgot about the Ryzen, if you have 4 of the 8 core 16 thread CPU's around you can get about 100k+ total.

WhitehawkEQ said:

Oh yea, forgot about the Ryzen, if you have 4 of the 8 core 16 thread CPU's around you can get about 100k+ total.

Click to expand...

Thought someone was averaging 100kPPDon one stock Ryzen 7 (all 16 threads).

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=781140

Yeah, 100k PPD. Not bad for 65W + system (Mobo, fans, single small SSD) not great performance per watt, not price per PPD, but still, fairly worthwhile to fold on. I was folding on 15 threads + one GPU (RX480) and getting an estimated 350-420k PPD (350K was the not very high point GPU WUs). Had to stop production for a bit cause I need to face-punch my CPU with some programs I need to cook up.

CPU no fold, got it. lol folding more then 4 phys cores on this chip will start hurting GPU PPD performance as well it seems.

I will start a build thread at the beginning of May and should have a rig up and running withing a few weeks time.

I used to fold with another name back in the day, earlier 00s. Im still in awe how many PPD these 10 series cards put out.

Frazier08 said:

Hello, as I introduced myself in at the welcome mat, I want to get serious into folding as a contribution to the world and to the forums ranking

I would like to farm out a few GTX1070s and just let them rip.

Click to expand...

Welcome to our home.

Bring those folding puppies on!! I can hardly wait to see you rocket to a BILLION and beyond !!

Thank you for joining.

CPU folding is really just to put icing on the cake. You can earn more points but the bulk will be from GPU. With that said, don't starve your cards. They will each need one thread per card to keep them feed with data. Also, when folding with CPU, make sure that you fold with an even number of threads. This does not apply to GPU's. If you have a 4 core HT CPU and three GPU's, the CPU will fold with 5 cores but wait. F@H does not like the odd number so you will need to adjust the slot down to 4 cores leaving one core basically idle.

PCIe x4 will slow your GPU's. I've not seen too much on how they do on x8. For my 980 Ti's, I'm looking to get a board that will do 3 x x16 but they are few and far between and costly so my search has been slow.

Looking forward to your mighty jump up the ranks. You can follow it along in the weekly newsletter as they get noted.

Boards with 3 x16 slots either need to have a PLX chip or 2 or have 2 cpu sockets. You'll probably need a 40lane cpu as well for a 1p solution. 2p wise you can get boards with 4 x16 and 3 x8 slots..

Welcome to the team!

I see that you have already blazed past 1,760+ team mates. It also looks like you'll be our newest millionaire by tomorrow. Way to make an opening statement.

Thanks for all the welcomes and tips, I can use them all! lol

Ideally I want a triple 16x set to maximize efficiency in a box, Im not sure if I will have more headaches trying to run that vs a more standard x16/x16/x8. How reliable is the PLX chip? Its a switch of some sort?

Im debating CPUs at the moment for my build, either a budget friendly 6800k or if I can find a prime motherboard for triple 16s then maybe reach for the 40 lane 6850k. 200 bucks for 12 more lanes... but cheaper than another machine to run a card.

- - - Updated - - -

Nathan_P said:

Boards with 3 x16 slots either need to have a PLX chip or 2 or have 2 cpu sockets. You'll probably need a 40lane cpu as well for a 1p solution. 2p wise you can get boards with 4 x16 and 3 x8 slots..

Click to expand...

what is this quad 16x magic you speak of? dual cpu? do they have those in 2011v3 form or could you recommend a board/cpu? I dont wanna break the bank but looking for a very efficient setup. So the less machines and the most gpus I can run the better.

Dual cpu boards for native quad x16, single cpu quad x16 is only doable with a PLX chip(s). Yes its basically a switch that allows you to hang multiple x16 slots off a single x16 feed. not sure how reliable they are as I haven't used one and I don't know if you would be able to tell if the PLX switch had failed or you would put it down to general board failure.

Personally I would look at an Asus board, I know some people hate them but I've had very few problems over the years with the ones that I have bought. They do single 2011v3 with PLX chips or dual 2011v3 with native quad x16. They are the top end of the range though so they will not be cheap. I've got a Z9PE-D8 WS that will run quad x16 and triple x8 and it was £370 new so around $500, the newer 2011v3 is the Z10PE-D8. Both require xeon cpu's but if you are only running a folding rig a couple of low end cpu's will be fine.

If you are in no rush I would wait for the Ryzen workstation & server boards to be out in a couple of months time - they are likely to be cheaper than intel and will offer more PCIe lanes. Xeons top out at 40 lanes so a dual cpu machine will have 80 lanes, a dual Ryzen system will have 128 lanes available for PCIe cards.

If you really want to purchase now, 99% of xeon E5 cpus are 40 lanes,even at the low end so you may be able to get a cheaper cpu than a 6850k