Old thread revived: Need help naming a rig

[TennesseeTony]

September, 2016

New build coming up soon, if all my incoming 'new' used Ebay pieces and dusty spare parts that have been laying around function correctly. And this one is already named: Devastator. Thanks to geecee for the name, suggested 13 months ago!

Devastator (Transformers: Decepticon, if you didn't already know), is actually composed of 6 other Constructicon Decepticons, large construction machines in their own right, that when combined make one heck of a behemoth.

So with that, I'm going to leave you in suspense until the December Folding race, saying only that this will certainly be a behemoth, and ugly.

 

[Ken g6]

So with that, I'm going to leave you in suspense until the December Folding race

Hm. I assume you know video cards are better at Folding than CPUs. So, what, this will have 6 GPUs?

 

[Markfw]

So what video cards are in it ? and whats the F@H PPD ?

 

[TennesseeTony]

The suspense is killing me too!

We will all find out together!

Teaser #1: Ken you are of course right about multiple GPU's, to the point of needing two PSU's.There are boards out there with 6 PCIe slots double spaced?

Teaser #2: Mark, as the points vary with the work unit, and I've only run F@H in earnest back in December, I'm not real sure. I don't overclock and most other's report higher PPD than I get using the same card(s). But I'm hoping for 3M PPD.

 

[Markfw]

Well, the stats are all messed up, but my ppd will be higher than today when December comes.. Question is how much higher. And yes, I have an SR-2 motherboard with 7 PCI-e Slots and double-spaced can fit 4 cards. But even with my 1200 watt Corsair at 92% (I think) efficiency, I am drawing 750 watts from the wall with just 2 980's, So at best it could handle one more at 900 watts. That would be pretty well maxing the PSU, not sure if I want to do that. and it goes from 850k to one million ppd. My new 1080 @2000 mhz does 450-825k ppd, matches my 980TI's (I think it is because it has less cuda cores). and I have a few more. So after the summer is over, I may have a few more PPD.

 

[TennesseeTony]

980 or 980Ti on the SR-2?

 

[Markfw]

980's on the SR-2. I have 2, soon to be 3 980TI's all on their own boxes, and another 980 on its own, and a 290. But the electric bill is at $300 a month with only the SR-2 and 2 980TI's running. With all my house may melt down. Oh, and the 1080;

So, summary,

3 x 980
3 x 980TI
1 x 1080 (same ppd as 980TI)
1 x 290 (1/2 the ppd of the 980TI)

And 3 x 24 thread boxes, 2 of which are shut down. Not worth it for 40-50k ppd.

my sig is close, but in the next few weeks, it will be way different.

 

[TennesseeTony]

The Annual Folding at Home Arms race starts early this year.

 

[petrusbroder]

Better now than never ...

 

[Markfw]

Windows 7 will not do the update patches. I have to upgrade to 10. I think MS did this on purpose. I do have 2 ubuntu boxes. I may have to be a convert.

 

[Markfw]

OK, so win 7 finally worked. Until this am, and after the last windows updates it said "something changed your boot sector", and would not boot. starting all over again.

and BTW, the 980TI card that I got for $380, went up to $490, but today is now down to $430. Acceptable if it does not go down more, but not a steal like it was at $380

 

[VirtualLarry]

OK, so win 7 finally worked. Until this am, and after the last windows updates it said "something changed your boot sector", and would not boot. starting all over again.

That sound like the Win7 update related to BitLocker, and Secure Boot, that was changed to Recommended, and interfere's with booting on Asus motherboards.

Is it an Asus board?

 

[Markfw]

Yes, its an ASUS !! Do you have the patch number ? this has cost me at least a whole day

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-windows-7-pcs-with-uefi-boot-glitch.2472300/

 

[Markfw]

So after about 10 other learnings (Thanks Larry) the last problem was windows update. So the "fix" was to tell it NOT to do anything, reboot, then manually search for updates. The other way it went all night and found none. My way, it found 237 updates in 10 minutes. I probably should have started my own thread on this new box. but now I have a real surprise for the F@H race this year....

I will leave it at that. And, I am not done buying hardware yet.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And, I am not done buying hardware yet.

 

[TennesseeTony]

...I have a real surprise for the F@H race this year.... ....And, I am not done buying hardware yet.

 

[petrusbroder]

 

[TennesseeTony]

Building Devastator has been a devastating experience so far. Ugh. 1st CPU defective, new M.2 drive not compatible with the motherboard (RMA), motherboard died today while running (RMA), small package of GPU power cables 'delivered' but wasn't delivered to ME (lost), Windows 7 refusing to update of course, other little things that I can't reveal yet or I'd ruin the surprise. At this point, the surprise will be if I ever get it built.

But, I'll never remember this if I don't record it somewhere, so I'm recording it here: The CPU is a Haswell-E Xeon E5-2658v3, which is a slow-ish 12 core/24 thread, several steps below Bee and WUSS, and many many $$$ hundreds cheaper.

 

[Markfw]

24 cores or threads does not work well at all in F@H. So whats the surprise for ?

I have 2 boxes one with 24 threads, and one with 24 cores, and the best of them at 3 ghz does 55k ppd. Not worth the power to turn them on.

And I may have found a way to help on the updates. Turn them off totally in windows, then reboot, and manually search for them.

 

[TennesseeTony]

The surprise is the rest of the system. So far you only know that I'm hoping for 3M ppd, some multiple of some model of GPU, twin power supplies and the CPU model.

The choice of CPU was a no brainer, it was the cheapest I could find, cheaper than a used i7-5820K even. And I once read from "The TeAm's Greatest Folder", some guy by the name of Markfw900 or something like that, that each GPU performs best with 2 cores (threads?). I can confirm the BOINC GPU projects certainly need a fair amount of CPU.

Also everybody knows that Windows needs at least 4 free cores/8 threads and PCIe RAID SSD's, just in case TrustedInstaller.exe decides to start running in the background, lol!

Just BOINCing around, the system draw with a single low end GPU (not crunching) was only 185watts at the wall, before the motherboard died.

In last year's race, Bee and WUSS were putting out 80k-120k ppd each, according to the manager/client/interface, before I went GPU only. Devastator is designed to be a GPU cruncher, but depending on the project there should be some threads to spare with this CPU.

 

[Markfw]

BTW, I was having a problem with an older X5570 system, the 980TI would not get over 200k ppd, and the cpu (with only 6 cores allowed) was doing 361, not K, just 361. So I paused the CPU client, and bam, and right now its doing 530k. But no problem with my 4790k, 3930K or 6700K leaving CPU running, and they get 12k, 20k, 22k respectively. Odd. And I have an idle 980, and a 290 that I may try again on a 24 core box. Aiming at 4mil ppd, and might buy more 980TI's if they come down.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Alright, Devastator is being scrapped, or at least neutered. The plan was to use a ASUS X99-E WS board, with dual PLX chips, to have one single system running 7 GPU's, 5@16x, and 2@8x.

Naturally the GPU's would need to be relocated using PCIe extenders, which is the reason for downgrading the project.

The first set of extenders worked ok, for a single card, but were unshielded and the cross talk with just TWO cards was causing crashes. So I stepped up from $6 cables to shielded $33 cables, and they are marginally better, but still cause crashes with just two cards in a test system.

The only PCIe extenders that apparently work reliably are made by 3M, and run over $100 each, and I'd need six of them.

So this new system will be a devastator in name only.

 

[Markfw]

Well, it was a good idea ! My SR-2 can do 4 cards on board, but in 7 slots(for dual slot cards, and I have the power for it, but I wanted to leave more room for cooling, hence only 2 running. In the old days, I had 4 9600GT single slot cards running in a box with a hex core AMD !

 

[VirtualLarry]

I still have my quad-GPU crunching box, sitting unused. It currently has four single-slot passively-cooled GT630 (Kepler, renamed to GT730) cards in it. K9A2 MSI AM2+ board with a 1045T in it.