Farming Questions

Ok

OK, here we go:
1. Noise
As you said, stay away from the VIA boards. I would also attempt to stay away from Celerons, also for their lousy production. There are hsf combinations out there which are very quiet, even though they do have a fan on them. If you keep the volume of the fan on the heatsink the same or very similar to the PSU fan, then you will not notice a noise level difference between 1 and 2 fans (I believe it would be on the magnitude of ~1 dB).
2.
For as little energy consumption as possible, use multiple boards per PSU as you said. I myself don't know too much about this, however I do knwo that you will want to stick with well known, higher quality PSUs for this (I believe that Sparkle/Fortron PSUs are very good for this sort of thing). I'll let someone with more experiance explain more of the details.
3.
For low cost, you will want to go with an all-in-one board with integrated video and ethernet. Biostar makes good ones, and they will usually only run around $50. You should be able to make a diskless layer for <$150 using one of those, a cheap processor, good quiet hsf, 128mb cheap RAM (since it doesn't affect folding much to justify the cost of more, better RAM), and a good PSU split between 2-3 layers.
Good luck farming, and welcome to the team!

u seem to want what everybody else wants, welcome aboard.

Hehe I think this says it best:

u seem to want what everybody else wants, welcome aboard.

Yea they will all be mobos with integrated lan, etc.... I know the celerons will be BAD, thats why im trying to keep my options open. I just saw a heatsink recently thats sort of a heatpipe idea that fits socket 478 and it uses coolant. Its called the Heatlane Zen NCU-1000 CPU Cooler They are cool little heatsinks but cost a pretty penny too. Using that I would definately use some p4s 2.4-2.8 HT. The other thing that sucks is the boards have to be vertical to allow for the cooling effect and in this farm they would all be horizontal... Also they dont seem to be that great based off of reviews so im back to square one. So if anyone has any ideas im open to them. The power will be fine as long as I can use 6 psus off of one outlet then I should be able to power 12 nodes. So im looking more for quietness than power efficiency.

Oh also yes im expecting to have to use a hsf combination since the only ones I know of that can run without a fan have already been stated. So hopefully that will expand some peoples ideas and comments.

I have the same goal as you and also looking for answer. So far my answer is partly answer, and I need some more work. Check out my post which has the spec noise of less than 30db noise. If you know about db measurement. Under 30db will not bother most people.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=281963

I would recommend the stock HSF that comes with any retail XP AMD. My farm is seven layers and it makes less noise than the dually Barton that I use for my main rig. You could also invest in 80mm Vantec Stealth fans which are uber quiet and push plenty of air for a HS.

Vantec Stealth Fan

Don't bother buying expensive PSU's for your farm, even if you're going to run two mobo's from one board. I have four 420W psu's that were $19 each and they work just fine.

Here's the link for the ATX Y-splitter to run two mobo's from one PSU.

Check the refurb's at Newegg.com as you will find mobo's with onboard vid/nic that fit the bill nicely and are priced <$40.

Wedo

Forton 300 watt PSU's with a SILENT 120mm fan are only $34 at newegg and run 2 boards fine. I have 2 of these and they are GREAT! I would even be tempted to run 3 boards off the 400 watter with the 120mm fan.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-104-979&depa=0

Here's an article about diskless folding with 1 server. The guy that wrote this article also as some farms with copper heatsinks with no fans on them, just a few 120mm's down the size of the farm.
http://www.hardfolding.com/index.php?go=57

Yeah, if you're splitting PSU's and are not overclocking your layers, stock heatsinks or stealth fans should be plenty quiet. Other ways to reduce noise- 7v modding fans, watercooling $$$.

I'd go for either-

1) Dual XP's @ 2Ghz+ without split PSU's (about $300-400 per layer depending on the deals you can get)

Good for at least 1300 PPW. I like this option because you get 2 CPU's per PSU, but don't have to bust out a soldering iron in order to split out the wires. The hardware is a bit more expensive, unless you find used/refurbished motherboards.


2) P4 w/ HT moderately overclocked to about 3Ghz with split PSU's (I'm not so good on Intel price figures... maybe $230 per layer?)

Good for 1100 PPW. A pretty good option if you can OC without making a lot of noise or blowing up your PSU. Doing the PSU mod is not so hard if you have some dead ATX PSU's to cut up and a soldering iron.


3) Inexpensive AMD layers @ 2.0 - 2.2 Ghz with split PSU's. (Can build these as cheap as $100 if you try really hard, $150 probably more the average). Even with split PSU's though, these will have the lowest points / power used ratio.

Each layer should be good for maybe 750 PPW.


Skills for the project:

Electrical- rewiring ATX PSU connectors
Linux- Setting up LTSP, DHCP, folding scripts, PXE/etherboot
Hardware/Other- Building boxes, building a rack

Arkaine23 said:

[B
Skills for the project:

Electrical- rewiring ATX PSU connectors
[/B]

Click to expand...

Arkaine,

The Link I provided above is for an ATX PSU Y-Cable for $15. The price is well worth my time to not have to splice and reconnect 20 wires per PSU.

Wedo

Seems pricey considering a 300w sparkle/fortran goes for about $25 (and since I know where to get them for $10).

Get 1.8Ghz durons from newegg and overclock them all to about 2.2Ghz. It is very easy to keep them cool.

From my experience on gromac cores a duron running at 2GHz put out the same PPW as a tbred athlon at 1.75GHz. Just so you know.

Wow I knew I would get responses quick but I didnt expect this. Thanks for all the help so far. I think I will go with p4s ht and maybe some overclocking but probably not because I want to stick with cheap ram. Should I stick with 2 per psu or go for it and try 3 per psu.... with that I would definately have to do some splicing and soldering.... I think I will go for 2 per psu. Whats an estimate of ppw if I had 12 nodes running (sorry lol im trying to call them layers but supercomputing is burned into my head) all 2.4-2.8 p4s HT? I like the AMD solution of course due to cost but would it be better to splurge and get the p4s or make it more layers and have them be AMD's... ? Oh also how much would the energy draw of a farm like this be. I do live in California and we are not blessed with the best energy prices

Wedo said:

Arkaine,

The Link I provided above is for an ATX PSU Y-Cable for $15. The price is well worth my time to not have to splice and reconnect 20 wires per PSU.

Wedo

Click to expand...

If you use this link you get a $3 discount on that atx splitter.

overdoze said:

From my experience on gromac cores a duron running at 2GHz put out the same PPW as a tbred athlon at 1.75GHz. Just so you know.

Click to expand...

Is there anywhere online or something that has a relative cpu performance measurement? I am looking at building two farms right now and here is my quandry: the 1.6ghz durons are $40 but the XP2100+ (that I really want) are $62. I plan to make both of them run on the 166bus, but I am not sure which ones are going to perform better - discounting the slight difference in clock speed when running on the 166 bus.

Arkaine - are you planning on sharing that power supply source with the group?

when you are running at 166fsb for all of the 266fsb amd cpus the resulting cpu speed is as following:

Duron 1.6GHz --------- 2GHz
Duron 1.8GHz --------- 2.2GHz
XP1800----------------- 1.9GHz
XP2000----------------- 2GHz
XP2100----------------- 2.1GHz
XP2200----------------- 2.2GHz
XP2400----------------- 2.5GHz (may not be able to OC that high)
barton mobile XP2400 - 2.2GHz (low power consumptions)

My guess is the duron 1.8 will produce the same PPW as the XP1800 at 166FSB.

I personally like the barton mobile XP2400 at 2.2GHz b/c it will run much cooler probably only at 1.6V and it has 512K cache which will produce more for the big gromac cores that we seem to get more often nowaday.

true, but the mobiles are a LOT more expensive and the mobos I have don't allow me to change multipliers. and since they are theoretically unsupported cpus, I don't want it defaulting to a 6x multi like my mobile 2500+ did.

There's a computer recycling place (Goodwill) here in town I go to for used parts. They usually have a couple of sparkles on hand for $9.95 plus tax. Cheap switches, keyboards, and monitors too.

nice. I wish we had something like that around here. All of the shops are super expensive for do-it-yourself computer parts