Best Bang For The Buck Folding Machines

[admin]

In the spirit of the Overclock.net Community Folding Project, let's start the discussion about what type of setup will give the project the best bang for the buck.

We have a KVM at our disposal, so don't worry about factoring in a display. Running caseless is not really an option. Other than that, the sky is pretty much the limit

[Bonz™]

The best bang for the buck for folding I would have to say is... the PS3

If not, a Q6600 and some other cheap parts...

[whe3ls]

look in my sig

[redsox83381]

Definitely PS3.

[Bonz™]

Ahh yes. Forgot the GPU folding

Ok so...

#1. PS3
#2. x1900 series
#3. Cheap quad core machine

[RonindeBeatrice]

The best bang for buck? I would say a Xeon 3210 at ~3 ghz, on a fairly inexpensive motherboard with onboard sound with butt cheap ram and loading 64 bit linux from a flash drive. PSU can be a earthwatts, or virtually anything that's cheap.

I'm expecting no more than $400 for everything and it will pull more than twice the PPD of a PS3.

[Bonz™]

Originally Posted by RonindeBeatrice

The best bang for buck? I would say a Xeon 3210 at ~3 ghz, on a fairly inexpensive motherboard with onboard sound with butt cheap ram and loading 64 bit linux from a flash drive. PSU can be a earthwatts, or virtually anything that's cheap.

I'm expecting no more than $400 for everything and it will pull more than twice the PPD of a PS3.

I thought folding was for the benefit of helping cancer/disease research and protein folding/misfolding, not for points...

And points don't measure exactly how much folding gets done.

[RonindeBeatrice]

Originally Posted by Bonz™

I thought folding was for the benefit of helping cancer/disease research and protein folding/misfolding, not for points...

Well, it wasn't really specified, but yes if it's about curing cancer then it's no doubt four used 1950 pros in my case with a couple of opterons pulling in whatever they can via smp.

My system $1000 + four used GPUs $480-600.

PS3 is weak stuff compared to a ATI 1900 series GPU.

That will be the best use of $1600 possible. A dozen PS3's couldn't perform more raw calculations.

[whe3ls]

with a q6600 or with a 3210 price with 3210 is 408.42
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=XEO...37792844af1205

os to put on the flash drive

[H3||scr3am]

what if we got some cheap quads (b3s used?) with some supported ATi cards to fold with...(I have a 9550 SE lying around (AGP) that I'd donate) these units could churn out some REALLY good ppd, @ a cool 3.3 GHz I turn out about 3000-3200 PPD (depends on assigned WUs, I have a B3) plus the additional GFX ppd would send this thing into orbit best way to build cheap units, skip the HD, use a USB thumbdrive with linux/windows preinstalled. Get about 1GB of RAM, no real need for anymore, cheap cases (maybe mod for airflow), and you can run them w/o a GFX card if you need...but SMP is where the points are.