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Best Bang For The Buck Folding Machines

post #1 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:02pm
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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
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post #2 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:06pm
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...
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post #3 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:07pm
look in my sig
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post #4 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:09pm
Definitely PS3.
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post #5 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:10pm
Ahh yes. Forgot the GPU folding

Ok so...

#1. PS3
#2. x1900 series
#3. Cheap quad core machine
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post #6 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:11pm
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.
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post #7 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by RonindeBeatrice View Post
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.
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post #8 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:14pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bonz™ View Post
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.
2010 called; they want their high end PC back.
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post #9 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:17pm

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
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post #10 of 91
1/29/08 at 6:23pm
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.
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