BOINC - nVidia / ATI

[The Borg]

Hi all,

Interested in the group opinion.

Just over a year ago I purchased an X1950 Pro card to do folding on. By the time I sorted out issues with getting it running, I found out that Folding no longer supports the X1950 card. :|

I am in the begining thinking stages of expanding my crunching rig as well as possibly upgrading my graphics card.

This is what I am thinking - BOINC now supports the CUDA enabled nVidia cards for SETI. I imagine other projects will follow suit soon. Anyway, you can run projects on a older versions of BOINC on old hardware - within reason for quite some time, but it seems less restricitve than what happened with Folding. I have P4's running Win 2k and BOINC versions 5.4.something happely producing results.

So, if I went and purchased a few highish end nVidia graphics cards and plugged them into my rigs, do you think that given the way BOINC / SETI runs I would at least be able to get a few years worth of work out of them?

As a few others have said, Folding is a good cause, but so difficult to set up and I don't want to get burnt again with a graphics card purchase.

 

[jonesthewine]

I think that any card that is CUDA capable will be viable and useful for quit a while. The technology and applications are relatively new, and just beginning to be exploited, so, any Nvidia card at the 8800GT level or above should be productive for years. I recently shifted four GPUs from F@H to BOINC ( GPUgrid) and so far so good, it has been a set-it-up and leave-it-alone experience.

Re your P4 rigs running BOINC, I'm sure that they are producing results, but chance are that they are doing so inefficiently from a power-draw standpoint. I bet that a cheap C2D or AMD X2 based rig would run much cooler and cheaper and process the workunits more quickly on a per core basis.

 

[The Borg]

Yes, I agree with your comment about the P4's. They are 3 years old. For the same reason, they were actually an upgrade from P1-166, and PII machines that I had managed to cobble together (about 15 of them). Got sick and tired of the incompatibilites of old parts (and the inefficiency) that I got the P4's. But I have 11 of them, so just tossing them away is not easy. My plan is actually some core 2 quads before they diappear. i7's are just too expensive.

A set-it-up and leave it is what I want and the machines are all headless - use VNC.