Planting the seeds for a farm

[Ven0m]

I wonder what's advantage of running high FSB with bigpackets. Perhaps it's not worth to spend lots of money. On the other hand, ther are pretty good cheap nforce mobos with limited "extra features" that would allow high OC, when proper cooler is used. You could grab one of these all-copper cheapo Zalman ripoffs for a few $$$ and OC CPUs nicely.

Low-quality mobos may have problems with power regulators and capacitors, making overclicking harder, even at lower FSBs too.

 

[gulp35]

Knock off Zalman

I have heard about the knock off zalman's but could not find a vendor...can you suggest one? We decided to try a Biostar M7NCD and will try out Overclockix on it.

My son was concerned that an onboard video system would cut into the resources to much so we decided to buy a video card for this one.

Unfortunately we had already bought it before we saw the post from Venom with his suggestion. But this way we can experiment running with no card at all and see how it does.

We are Linux novices and want use this system to get some experience. We borrowed a Redhat book and are reading it.

We are trying to buy a farm, but have a reticent seller right now. If he ends up not selling we will make more layers, if he does sell, we will make this sytem part of the farm (if my son doesn't make off with the XP-M 2500).

Hopefully the parts will all be here next week and we can spend the long weekend playing with it.

 

[Ven0m]

These coolers were discussed in air cooling subforum. Unfortunatly, I've got serious problems finding these threads.
SVC had more of these and for better prices earlier, but there are some liks: 92mm AlCu, all-copper heatsink. There was also some company making AlCu ones with 80mm fans (not that bad) for around $8.50. It's name started with X probably and there was thread about it in cooling section. I really have serious problems with recalling details.

These coolers have socket mounting bracket, so they don't need mobo holes. I have 80mm one, all-copper by Pentagram and my mobo reports 17*C over room temp while folding with fan at 5.5v. They usually need some lapping, but then - they're pretty good.

The first company to offer "Zalman copies" was probably Polish company - Pentagram with Freezone series. I don't require from you understanding this lanugage, but you can see what coolers they make and their dimensions. Facts worth mentioning are that even 120mm monsters fit Socket A mobos and that most of these coolers are avaible in US, but under different names, like PC Cooler.

 

[Arkaine23]

We'll be here to help when your npars arrive. About onboard video- onboard video systems usually have a selectable amount of system ram which they can be configured to use as video ram through the bios. Typically you can set 4mb, 8mb, 16mb, 32mb, or 64mb. Nothing intense grapically speaking is needed. In fact I've run Overclockix in graphical mode on a 1MB video subsytem. So you could select a very small value for video ram, even on the server. The client machines boot without a GUI, and look much like an old DOS system- black screen with a command prompt. They will be using less than 64MB of ram for the OS, so even with a 256MB stick and 8-64MB reserved by onboard video, there'd still be enough ram left over for folding a big packet gromacs unit. The server boots into the full-featured K Desktop Environment (KDE) by default, which use much like Windows XP in its resource-hogging goodness. On the server, ram will be tighter, however since it also has a HDD, there will be swap space available when ram runs low.

If you've already ordered the parts, then don't fret. But if not, just know that onboard video can be set to use a very small bit of system ram. A Linux folding LTSP server or client is not going to need a whole lot. The clients use very little ram because they boot into text mode. 256MB of ram should be fine for clients, and even a server serving up to 10 client machines. Although I generally suggest 512MB for the server.

 

[PCGUY112887]

Why not do something like this?

$35
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-185-036&depa=1

$50
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-104-160&depa=1

$14
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-223-001&depa=1

$5 - Random usable heatsink

Add a bit of $$ for your favorite PSU split between 2 mobo's

Surelly you could get 2ghz out of each, and it would be 1/2 the cost of the XP-M rigs?

 

[gulp35]

More questions

Thanks for all your input. We have taken your advice to heart and tried out Overclockix 3.7 on one of our machines this weekend. It read off the CD perfectly, found all the devices, we told it to look for the network (which it found), and started folding two instances all on its own!

We were able to mount the hard drive, view the files there, and even change permissions. We were chicken to write anything (this is the family’s main computer for Internetting!).

The set up seems very nice. I am guessing/hoping that most things can be carried out from the GUI and we will only need to access the console for more hardcore activities.

I have a couple of questions. First, is 3.7 the best choice at this time? We are going to set up a XP 2500 mobile as the server, with a 20-gig drive.

Second, how do we reformat this drive...will that come up as an option when we ask to install to the hard drive or do need to get into the console. This hard drive was previously used as an XP drive. We have backed up everything on it and would be happy to totally reformat it.

We were thinking of trying out some other versions of Linux...can we just set up a few partitions and then load the other versions (we just curious, we don’t find Overclockix lacking, we would just like to try some others out).

While we were testing it, it was folding and using most of the 256Mb of ram, it was quite slow when we tried to open up stuff like the office programs (again, were are curious as cats). We are guessing it was slow because it was using all the ram as a ram disk...is this correct?

I am guessing we can load the LSTP to the clients from 3.7...it that correct. Is this the best version to use? Does it automatically set up the directories on the server for the client files? I guess it will all become clear when we try it, but I am just trying to figure out how this will all work. I have ordered a second NIC...one to talk to the home network/internet and the second to talk to the farm. Any tricks to setting this up?

OK, now an on topic but way out there question. I have an ancient PC - a Cyrix 6x86-P166+ that runs Windows 95. It has a network card (network Everywhere, Model NC100, ver 2.1) and I was thinking of setting up Linix on it so we could test the headless stuff out between our new machine and this old clunker (before we buy/ build the rest of the farm). I tried today to do the CD load up, but it just kept rebooting...it never got to the place where you put in the “cheat code” even. It this thing just too old to mess with our am I missing something obvious?

Sorry for all these rookie questions...perhaps most will be answered when we load it to the hard drive and fire it up.

Thanks again for all your help

And PC guy...I’m not ignoring your idea...I need to sit down and calculate the economics! Thanks for you input.