Couple of Questions

Ok, I'm building a farm this summer (I have a good job programming PHP for a couple people).

What I need to know is:

What is the ABSOLUTE best bang/buck folding machines? Is it LV Xeons? Is it Mobile bartons? What is it?

Also, for the above chips, how many at what megahzertz would I need for about 4000 points/day.


Thanks,
-Sam

um... 4000 points/day is about what i get (falling for some reason, got to get something worked out).... which is something around 80-90ghz?

Right now I'm at 1400 ppd. Are all of yours on 24/7 with all the fancy flags and stuff? Mine will be.

-Sam

i think they are 24/7 but no fancy flags. what are you folding on? i don't think one computer is going to do 4000ppd...

from what I have heard athlon XP's are the best bang for your buck usually.

I cant speak for the amd side, but hears a run down on what to expect for a dually xeon setup:

Dually 1.6 lv's clocked up to 2.8ghz average quad instances of big packets
- 4200 - PPW ~ 600 PPD: 600$ ish per layer

so basically 1$ per Point per day

K, hopefully someone with amd dually experience will pipe in

1$?

You mean $1?
Sorry, that was just bugging me.

Dual Xeons will get you NICE powah, especially since they're so cheap now. However, you will be able to get away with 15 Semprons in a nice farm for about $1500 if your lucky.

7

My numbers say
Opteron[dually] = 131 points / 1Ghz / day
AthlonXP(150fsb)[dually] = 95 points / 1Ghz / day
AthlonXP(200fsb) = 116 points / 1Ghz / day

thats folding the 600 point workunits.
cost wise i'm guessing AXP > opteron & A64.

stan03 said:

i think they are 24/7 but no fancy flags. what are you folding on? i don't think one computer is going to do 4000ppd...

Click to expand...

Right now I'm 24/7 on
A64 3200+ @ 2.2GHz s754 512MB 400FSB (XP)
A64 3200+ @ 2.2GHz s754 512MB 400FSB (XP)
P4C & 3.2GHz s478 512MB 550FSB (two instances on XP)
P4E & 3.1GHz s478 512MB 480FSB (two instances on XP)
PIII @ 1.0GHz s370 512MB 133FSB (XP)
A-Duron @ 1.2GHz sA 256MB 133FSB (XP)
AXP-M @ 2.2GHz sA 512MB 200FSB (linux core v 2.6)

AXP-M @ 2.3GHz sA 512MB 200FSB (not 24/7, a borg, unsure of hours)

-Sam

EDIT: all running big WU's, -advmethods, -local (on some), -forceasm -verbosity 9

Looking @ my stats on 600 pointers and the current cost of the processor only, this is what I get:

AMD XP-M 2500+@ 2.4 GHz, 268ppd, $85, $0.32/ppd
P4C 2.8 @ 3.1, 325ppd, $173, $0.53/ppd
Dual Xeon Nocona 3.0 @ 3.09, 700ppd, $638, $0.91/ppd,
AMD FX-53, 325 ppd, $727, $2.23/ppd

AMD XP-M is the clear winner among my rigs. I've built 7 or 8 of them and all run at least 200 x 12 on an NF7-S.

I put my vote in for AXP's. You can score mobo's with onboard vid/network, run diskless, from a pendrive, or from a small HD with 512 of ram for very little $$$$.

Yeah, thats what I was thinking.

What about dual AXP-M's, has anybody tried that?

-Sam

Naw.
A $90 Sempron/Mobo combo from Newegg will get you much further than an AXP-M ever will. The goal is not overclockability, but rather as cheap as you can get layers dude.

Remember:

xx of mobo/cpu combo
xx of RAM
1 HDD
1 CD-ROM
Network switch worth xx ports
Intarweb connection
Bawks for all of this

There's more after that. However, you CAN get away with $100 per layer if you play your cards right.

7

^^^ No no Hard Drive or CD-ROM required. Diskless.

Semprons = not good for new WU's, smaller and slower cache, slower bus speed, slower RAM. You'd need more, but with more, you also get higher power costs. That's not a good thing when you already pay your parents $60/month for your existing computers (see above posts). Now, on the other hand, AXP-M on bigpackets = (from my experience) around 250ppd, and you can get one of those for about $250, total, including 1/2 gig of RAM and a nice mobo. If I were to go EPOX and 256 megs of RAM, it'd bring the cost down around $150.

-Sam

XP Mobiles would do the job I think, and they don't usethat much pwoer.
I wonder why A64 and opterons score so bad...

They're not bad actually. I have two of them going 24/7 and they produce exactly 300ppd each, (see above list).

-Sam

You know, I'm not really seeing a diff between Duron applebreds and Athlons here. I'm also not seeing a HUGE diff between SDRAM and single channel DDR, hmm everyone seems to be quoting much higher ppd than I've ever seen though, though I did ask about my production a while back and ppl seemed to think it was fine. I don't have bigpackets on though, I'm running 98SE so can't use F@H5. I'm only currently seeing about 500 ppw per 1.6Ghzish CPU. I've got to go to work on the overclocks though. Every applebred seems to be capable of 2.2Ghz. If I was buying AMD farmage though, I'd got for the applebreds over the semprons, just because the smprons are so hard to push with the high default FSB, you want everything a bit more reliable with folding rigs, and you don't wanna have to buy top end RAM for all of them. With applebreds you should be able to build the rigs production line fashion, either any "B" Duron 1.4Gs and any cheap 200fsb board and generic PC3200 and you can just bang the vcore to 1.85 FSB to 200 and they should run 2100 fine. Or if you can be selective and find good stepping 1.6Gs then you can just bang them in at 2.4Ghz. Farmage is half about getting fast CPUs for your money and half about getting fast stable CPUs for your money and not getting too many headaches tweaking the damn things, which is where folding farmers have nervous breakdowns. You've got to find CPUs and mobos that are about guaranteed to hit the clocks you want, some people might get lucky with one or two rigs that they can babysit all day, and thier numbers are impressive, but in the end it's uptime that counts.

Road Warrior

Personally, i dont own dual xeon but i do own a few amd-xp and they yield very good ppd on bigpackets Wus.

For best bang for the buck i think there are 2 possible answers:

As someone above mentioned about folding w/ cluster w/o hdd/vid so basically just need RAM+CPU+Mobo.

1) amd-xp mobiles , ~$180 per layer and can easily OC to 2.4-2.5ghz. That is 600pts/50hrs ~ 288ppd which turn out you need at least 14 layers to obtain 4000ppd. The net total would be $2800+.

2) Or dual xeon 1.6 lv and clock up. You would need 7 layers to give 4K+ppd. And the net total is $4000+



**the above stats is for the current bigpacket Wus. Who knows how the ppd on each flatform would turn out when Stanford release new Wus. So, there is also many factors to consider (ie electric bills,space and heat )



+++++++++++++

I wonder why A64 and opterons score so bad..

Click to expand...

not true. Maybe at DF . But once it's 2.5 or up, other single-cpu system hard to keep up. My buddy finishes P1475 (364pts) in less than 20hrs (11-12min/frame versus 20mins/frame on my 2.55ghz xp-m) that is more than 400 ppd.


Kevin

Seven said:

1$?

You mean $1?
Sorry, that was just bugging me.

Dual Xeons will get you NICE powah, especially since they're so cheap now. However, you will be able to get away with 15 Semprons in a nice farm for about $1500 if your lucky.

7

Click to expand...

i would love to see how you specs those sempron layer so it would accomplish 4000ppd with only 15.

Seven said:

Naw.
A $90 Sempron/Mobo combo from Newegg will get you much further than an AXP-M ever will. The goal is not overclockability, but rather as cheap as you can get layers dude.

Click to expand...

How good are those Sempr0ns at folding? I borged one about a month ago.