Wannbe farmers-cheap folding blade formula
I was reading a thread over at the HardOCP DC forum yesterday and they were talking about getting cheap rigs for dedicated folding machines and one member posted that you could build a dedicated folding blade for around $200 at Newegg, so I decided to see what I could work up. 
My solution for a dedicated folding blade came up to over $200, but not too much higher and was using all new components. You could very well be well under $200 if you can find some used hard drives big enough for a dedicated folding rig or decide to go diskless. Anyways, here's what I worked up for a cheap folding blade, no case or cd or floppy included.
Processor: Retail XP2000+, Tbred core, should overclock to 2075 MHz on a 166 fsb with little or no vcore increase - $58
Motherboard: PCChips M863G v.1.5 with integrated video & lan (SiS 741GX chipset) - $43
Memory: V-Data PC2700 256 MB - $38
PSU: Fortron Hi-Q brand 350 watt - $25
Hard drive: Western Digital 20 gig 7,200 rpm drive - $53
Shipping: $6.99
Total for blade: $223.99
Now if you have an old hard drive thats 2 gig or larger, you can build this blade for $170.99. This would make a fine points producing blade folder, in case anyone wants to build a farm on the cheap.
My solution for a dedicated folding blade came up to over $200, but not too much higher and was using all new components. You could very well be well under $200 if you can find some used hard drives big enough for a dedicated folding rig or decide to go diskless. Anyways, here's what I worked up for a cheap folding blade, no case or cd or floppy included.Processor: Retail XP2000+, Tbred core, should overclock to 2075 MHz on a 166 fsb with little or no vcore increase - $58
Motherboard: PCChips M863G v.1.5 with integrated video & lan (SiS 741GX chipset) - $43
Memory: V-Data PC2700 256 MB - $38
PSU: Fortron Hi-Q brand 350 watt - $25
Hard drive: Western Digital 20 gig 7,200 rpm drive - $53
Shipping: $6.99
Total for blade: $223.99
Now if you have an old hard drive thats 2 gig or larger, you can build this blade for $170.99. This would make a fine points producing blade folder, in case anyone wants to build a farm on the cheap.
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This is similar to a setup I was pricing out the other day. Just window-shopping until I get back to work.
Boy am I glad folding is not addictive or anything!
Good Find.
Find yourself a cheap video card (if needed) and a small HDD for like $5.
I also like to get this stick of RAM. Buffalo PC3200 with CH5 sticks. $10 more for PC3200 and much more.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-150-614&depa=1
Retail HSs are nice and quiet too. I had one on my slowest machine with a 1700+ TbredA and you couldnt even tell it was on it was so quiet. My roommate about knocked it over once and still didnt know.
KingFish has bought whole nodes off of newegg. I think his are pretty cheap.I think he uses the BIOSTAR motherboard.
Another way to save some money in parts and electricity (small amount) would be to network boot. You could fit quite a few 2000 installs on the 20GB HDD above.
BioStar mobos are good for this app.
Yeah, the Biostar boards also work well if you canc get them for the same price or less than that PCChips board. The Biostar nf2 boards aren't bad for cheapie boards. I went with 256 MB in my setup because it's not that much more in cost and I've noticed a trend with Gromacs work where it looks like the newer wu's are having a larger memory footprint and since the board also uses system memory for it's graphics, it kind of future proofs the blade for work in the future requiring a larger memory footprint. 128 MB should do fine for present work though.
I've noticed Gro work in the last month or 2 that was using 40-60 MB memory while processing and I have a feeling as they refine the client and the process, the memory footprint will continue to grow.
Good point. :Rocker:
Here's the rough breakdown:
Biostar M7VQK Pro (integrated video) $45
Ram 256mb generic or crucial, can't remember $45
Allied 300w PSU $20
HSF Coolermaster, can't remember model number $10
CPU-AMD 2400 $70 (I'm sure price has changed since I've purchased mine)
As you can see it's about the same prices. I've already done that research with help from some other members here in these forums so this really isn't anything new. Glad HardOCP can catch up with us on this issue
If anyone is interested in this setup I can help them work out the bugs specific to these mobo's so buy with confidence.
KingFish
How much heat is coming out of the back of those PSUs. I bet there is a nice amount considering in another thread you said each system took 110W which after effieciency is around 83W at 75% effieciency which is probably good for the kinda of PSU. I bet I could take a quality PSU of 300W or more and it would produce less heat because it would not be under very much load.
Ebay is better for HDDs. Get a bunch of 2gb or even smaller drives for like $5 each or so. You can actually run 2k of a 1gb HDD, 2gb is plenty.
Here's mine: Parts Total: $172.85
Newegg Shipping: $15.80
Grand Total: 188.65 (Plus HD shipping; varies by zip code)
2gb... u must be running Linux lol
I was having a 'forum' conversation with a guy on one of the BOINC project boards about his Sempron farm and he was happier with his XP based crunchers for OC's stability and amount of crunching getting done.... but he wasn't using the palermo cores. The reviews I've read suggest that these are pretty easy to bump a bit and not overheat with the stock HSF.... hope so.
I'd have to agree with you about not needing a super-mongo PSU. For our Team 93 SMx Project I'm currently running F@H 24/7 on an NF7-S with a Barton 2500+ on an AcBel 145W mATX PSU. The batteries in my digital thermometer just croaked, but a low-tech temp reading (I stuck my hand in front of the output fan
If that info holds up, it sounds like a great idea. I enjoy OC'ing as much as anyone, but in many cases the extra cooling necessary costs as much as just buying a faster CPU to begin with. It's still fun, just not a real money-saver. If you can do it with stock parts you'd have the best of both worlds.
Thats fine. I know we wont agree, this is a folding forum and I noticed you have a SETI desktop.
Its a fact that the close the load is to the actual max performance of the PSU the more heat it is going to produce. I have a few Antec PSUs that produce hardly any heat at all because its just folding and there is hardly a load on the PSU.
Win2k installs with like 800mb. The more memory you run the bigger the page file is set to. It can be dramatically reduced since, we just have crunching machines, Folding in my case and SETI (or maybe others by your sig) in yours, and there is hardly much of a use for a page file with even just 256mb of RAM.
I have a 1.2GB HDD running Win2k with ~56mb left and there and I have about ~130mb of installed programs that are not needed. The page file is set to 256mb and Registry size set to max of 20mb with 10mb used. There is ample space for 2k on a 1gb HDD. Even XP will run on a 2gb HDD, it only needs 1.6GB. Both can be cut back even further.
I've only done this out of convenience (i.e. I already had a 2GB HD handy). Going the eBay route a 4GB drive costs about the same and makes the file-pruning unnecessary.
On a few rigs I've followed primesuspect's F@H on Linux Guide and gotten great results on drives even smaller than 2GB. I'm a complete novice when it comes to Linux, but it really was simple to set up.
Strangely enough, the price of the RAM and processor in your post has gone UP. Not a good thing.
The MB has increased, by about $6, meaning that the whole works would now set you back a whopping $192.79 instead of the previously quoted price of $188.65.
Hardly a deal-breaker for a guy looking to spend $750 for two rigs... He could buy four of them for a mere $20 more by following that advice.
I ended up purchasing a Sempron 3100+ for about $104 (now at $99 on newegg). It's the processor in a box #SDA3100BXBOX. The "BX" may be significant as this is the later version of these based on the 90nm cores that support SSE2, SSE3 and 64bit arch. I've read someplace that the 90nm cores run cooler than the 130nm cores and this may be backed up a bit by AMD's specs of max case temp which is 1 degree celcius lower on the 90nm.
Anyway, I bought this along with a Gigabyte mobo #GA-K8VM800M ($54, uses the VIA K8M800 / VIA VT8237 chipset). I paired this up with one of the pile of eBay drives I'd bought as a result of recomendations in this thread ($6 to $20, depending age/size/volume) and a $9.95 PSU from Goodwill and a 512MB stick of Cosair XMS PC3200 I bought from a guy ($88 for a pair, @$44). So let's see that would total up to around $220.
This turned out not to be the chipset to get any real OC out of this CPU as it appears the AGP/PCI buss frequencies climb with the FSB settings and I couldn't get it to run 24/7 stable at more than 1845Mhz (205x9) on this mobo.
I subsequently swapped the K8M800 board out for a ECS NFORCE3-A mobo ($55) but would've used the EPoX EP-8KDA3I ($50) or the EPoX EP-8KDA3J ($70) if I could've put my hands on one at the time. I suspect any of the nForce 3 chipset based mobos would work fine. The key seems to be the ability to lock the PCI/AGP frequency and apply memory dividers to limit the freq my PC3200 memory is running at.
Well to make a long story not quite so long the Sempron/ECS combo has been crunching BOINC projects for about a week now, 24/7 with CPU @ 100% (windows xp) where the mobo FSB setting topped out at 250. Here are the details:
Crunch8
AMD Sempron 64 3100+
Palermo - OPN SDA3300AIO2BX, 256KB L2
2.25GHz (2249.62MHz) - 9 x 250, HT 1000.23MHz
ECS NFORCE3-A w/ nforce3 250 chipset
1x512MB Corsair CMX PC3200, 2.5-3-2-8 / 1T, DDR 204MHz
WinXP Pro SP1
CPU voltage is at 1.47 (up 0.055v) and the DDRAM voltage has been bumped up by 0.1v. It's running the stock HSF in "SMART" mode (rpm is temp controlled from the mobo). Idle temp is ~95F. In a cold room (~64F, it's winter here) the full load CPU temp averages 109~111F. In a warm room (~80F), full load, it averages 118~120F. I did replace the stock thermal pad with artic silver 5. However this is with all the components zip tied into a stackable basket and put up on my existing stack so there's no case involved.
Overall I'm very happy with a $220 cruncher that's easily crunching faster than a stock speed Athlon 64 3200+ and maybe faster than a stock speed 3400+ based on SETI's reference benchmark work unit run times. To put it into Intel terms, based on those same timings, it appears to be just a bit slower than "Pentium 4 2.4GHz (Northwood) @ 3GHz, 512KB L2, 512MB DDR400 dual channel" and i bit faster than a "Xeon 3.06 (Prestoria) 512KB L2 cache"... whatever that is.
Sandra 32bit gives it a "PR rating" of 3375. I haven't tried the 64bit version.
With MBM and VNC running it's Sandra Lite (SR3 32x86) scores are:
Math - Dry 10114, Whet 4624
Mem Bndwdth - 3164/3165MBs
Cache & Mem - 4710