Affordable DDR2 mobo for gpu farm?

[Peter Trend]

Hey guys,

I didn't quite want to pay for the GTX 260s so decided to opt for some 8800GTs instead for now. Managed to get hold of 3x Accelero S1 Rev 2s and 4x 8800GT 512MB cards for around £280 altogether and I'm planning to use them in a 3 node ATX folding farm fit into a set of Ikea drawers (a gpu version of this http://helmer.sfe.se/ )

Having a LOT of trouble with motherboards recently. Had a Foxconn ELA and an ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium DOI, and random BSODs on a gaming PC I built for a friend a year ago. Not impressed.

I only have one Q6600 and a Phenom 9500 spare at the moment, though might have a Phenom II 940 spare if the X6 prices come down a little. Q6600s seem fairly good value for money though. For RAM I have 4x 1066 1GB Corsair Dominator sticks spare.

Do you have any recommendations for cheap, reliable DDR2 motherboards for any CPU with 3 or 4 double-width PCI-e slots?

I found this AM3 board, which looks promising, but certainly not very cheap, and its DDR3!

Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7 Motherboard:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/mainboard/gigabyte-890fxa-ud7-890fx-p1.html

 

[Duvie]

I thought DDR3 prices were becoming more and more comparable to DDR2....

I cannot seem to get my smp2 client to use my memory....I have 4gb and I am currently only using 1.9gb for the whole system...

How do I get work units that take advanatge of all my memory?

I remember the old smp client I woudl peg my memory and it really bogged my computer down if I wanted to do other things on it...NOw it is if nothing is even running...plus I have 2gb of memory less....

My gpu only uses 200mb of my 1.2gb as well...

 

[Peter Trend]

Yeah you are actually right, DDR3 is not too much more expensive these days, although maybe still a little more. I would simply rather stick with DDR2 if possible as I have 4-8GB of it spare (4GB not plugged in to anything, the same again in my main machine which I could pull out if necessary). But I don't actually have much in the way of money left over, so I'm looking to re-use old parts where possible. I have everything but a good motherboard or three. I heard that the MSI K9N Platinum was good for gpu farms, but it is discontinued and I can't find it anywhere! You have any suggestions?

Socket 775 would be the prefered socket if I had to choose, but I'm stuggling to find anything at all with 4 pci-e x16 or even x8 slots

 

[Peter Trend]

How do I get work units that take advanatge of all my memory?

My gpu only uses 200mb of my 1.2gb as well...

I'm not sure this is possible, but I'm not sure if it wold be all that helpful either. I think it's a good thing that Stanford make clients which are not memory hogs; it should allow people to run the clients unobtrusively so that they don't need to exit them whenever they want to use the machine for anything. I mean I can see why it would be better to load the whole set of f@h files and data into global (system) memory to minimise slow disk reads/writes, but I imagine it could be very difficult to write code that would find much use for 8GB of RAM and still run on <512mb on someones laptop, work computer etc.. The flip side is that code that works with less RAM will still work on a system with more RAM, so is much more versatile.

If you insist on trying to make use of all of your RAM, it should be possible by running multiple VMs and say assigning 512mb to each VM. I'm not sure which DC projects, if any would actually benefit from this - I know the main thing for F@H is to get the results back as quickly as possible, which is CPU/GPU-bottlenecked, not RAM-bottlenecked (beyond 1-2GB or so).

I hope that goes some way to answering your questions.

 

[Duvie]

Yes id did...

I had MarkFW look at a bunch of his Q6600 boxes and he is getting similar memory usage using the A3 cores...The only issue is his Q6600's with less cache but slightly oc'd higher are averaging right now 6-7k with one around like 3k....Maybe I haven't gotten any of the high bonus WUs....I am using a passkey

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

At the moment, my SMP2 client is using a tad shy of 90MB memory, and my GPU is using 33MB. Folding doesn't rely on the amount of memory you have, but its speed matters a lot, especially for -bigadv (which you can't run anyway). The biggest memory user for Folding is aforementioned -bigadv, which uses about 4.6GB minimum. And it's either that or SMP2, which uses 100MB or so.

I had MarkFW look at a bunch of his Q6600 boxes and he is getting similar memory usage using the A3 cores...The only issue is his Q6600's with less cache but slightly oc'd higher are averaging right now 6-7k with one around like 3k....Maybe I haven't gotten any of the high bonus WUs....I am using a passkey

If you stop your GPU clients and your java exec you should get a lot closer to what he's getting. As I said before SMP2 is very sensitive to CPU usage; running -smp 8 with one core completely used up takes away half my ppd, and even web browsing takes off 2-3k.

If you insist on trying to make use of all of your RAM, it should be possible by running multiple VMs and say assigning 512mb to each VM. I'm not sure which DC projects, if any would actually benefit from this - I know the main thing for F@H is to get the results back as quickly as possible, which is CPU/GPU-bottlenecked, not RAM-bottlenecked (beyond 1-2GB or so).

Do not do this, it is a complete waste of time and RAM, and doesn't help at all. In fact, it will be a detriment, as your WUs will have to run through the overhead of several virtual machines, they will still get the same processing power, you will get less bonus, and especially if you run Linux VMs, they will run even slower as the Windows client is a bit more efficient than the linux SMP2.

 

[Duvie]

I believe MarkFW is running at least one gpu client on all of those Q6600 boxes....YOu think me getting back that 10&#37; will get me to his numbers? I am like 33% behind and loosing maybe 10% cpu usage on average....Those numbers dont compute

PLus the gpu2 client he runs he says he is getting virtually no cpu usage by the gpu client

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I believe MarkFW is running at least one gpu client on all of those Q6600 boxes....YOu think me getting back that 10&#37; will get me to his numbers? I am like 33% behind and loosing maybe 10% cpu usage on average....Those numbers dont compute

PLus the gpu2 client he runs he says he is getting virtually no cpu usage by the gpu client

Yes. I can post screenshots of my ppd running -smp 8 with and without one core fully loaded with another process, if you want.

And Mark's GPUs are apparently running with 0 CPU utilization, whereas I believe you said yours ran at 3-6% usage. There is a difference, and with SMP2, that is a big difference. Plus, you have that java2.exe running, whatever it's doing.

 

[Markfw]

The problem here is apples and oranges. I am running XP. Win7 is a different animal, you can't compare anything to my boxes, due to the differences in the OS.

I just checked task manager, my a3 client has used one hour, one minute of cpu, and the 11 cores (GPU) have used one second. java.exe has also used one second.

I have no clue how to optimize Win7. I installed it, and couldn't even get F@H to run correctly, so I never run it. XP does all I need.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Forget it.

 

[Duvie]

All I am trying to do is ascertain if I have running my quad at the best config to maximize my time and ppd....

If you guys can help at all it is very much appreciated....

 

[Markfw]

The operating systems are different, but not that much different.

Duvie, would you tell them some of the things you had to do, to get F@H to run ? Maybe I could even convert, if I could figure it all out...

One topic, let me say its really hard to find a good 3 card motherboard, especially when you have dual-width cards...

Make sure you have at least a 700 watt GOOD QUALITY PSU. I have the refurb specials from OCZ, $40 each, and they are wonderful. I have one MSI board, and its been a pain, and one gigabyte one that OK< but I can't see the motherboard, and its off now.

 

[Peter Trend]

Do not do this, it is a complete waste of time and RAM, and doesn't help at all.

I thought so

Make sure you have at least a 700 watt GOOD QUALITY PSU. I have the refurb specials from OCZ, $40 each, and they are wonderful. I have one MSI board, and its been a pain, and one gigabyte one that OK< but I can't see the motherboard, and its off now.

I got hold of a Seasonic Gold x750 so the first box is taken care of. Might look at cheaper alternatives for the other two, but I want a good warranty.

Motherboards stress me out! I want to hurry up and build something...

 

[Peter Trend]

My Foxconn RMA arrived so my PPD just jumped up again
Got three 8800GTs with Acceleros @ 720/1782/950 not had chance to properly overclock them yet though. Q6600@stock is 52C idle ~ 66C load with stock cooler definitely need new cooler on it soon.

I tried using Ubuntu and totally failed to get my ethernet LAN working so have put XP on it for now. Linux is confusing me.

Oh yeah, it's only using 353 watts..which is not too bad really.

Time for a beer!

 

[petrusbroder]

Well, done, Cheers!

 

[GLeeM]

Nice!

Q6600@stock

FAHMON shows the SMP client as only 650 ppd.
6701 is a early completion bonus WU - with the bonus, you should get about 2,800 ppd!!!
HFM.NET (a newer monitoring app) calculates the bonus for you.
Or you can use this site: http://www.linuxforge.net/bonuscalc2.php

 

[Peter Trend]

Thanks!

I have installed HFM and OCed the CPU to 2.8GHz using stock HSF. It's now 67C with the window open lol..better cooling soon.
HFM shows ~21,500PPD
fahmon shows ~18,500PPD

370W draw, up by about 10W with a 400MHz increase to CPU freq.

I am considering using a PHII X6 1090T in this motherboard as the next machine:

MSI's 790FX-GD70 http://techreport.com/articles.x/16702/5

I still have another 8800GT but no board to use!