GPU folding box?
okay, so i'm getting a bit addicted to this folding business. 
would it make long term sense to buy a twin 8800 box with a dual core right now? 9k ppd am i correct?
will the 8800 still be able to get 4k ppd a year from now? and are ATI cards going to start to see the kind of performance people get from nvidias anytime soon?
would it make long term sense to buy a twin 8800 box with a dual core right now? 9k ppd am i correct?will the 8800 still be able to get 4k ppd a year from now? and are ATI cards going to start to see the kind of performance people get from nvidias anytime soon?
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With a slight shader overclock, G92-based video cards, 8800 and 9800 series (NOT original 8800GTX, which is G80) can get 6,000PPD. I've had to GPU clients run slightly over 6,000PPD just today. For a while, the 57XX series work units were outputting around 3500 (depending on shader clock). The newer series of projects are much more productive.
I really doubt it. That would require a nearly complete architectural revision at the GPU nano scale. Just recently ATI GPUs have seen a significant Folding performance increase due to driver revisions. There is still headroom left in coding, but nothing that I know of that will put ATI in the same arena with Nvidia with respect to Folding for probably at least six months to a year, probably the latter.
Please, ATI fanboys, don't take it as a slam. ATI was the first to support GPU Folding@Home and were pioneers in this field of processing. For now though, they have been leapfrogged by Nvidia.
I don't think anyone can predict drivers performance and Pande Team Folding projects that far into the future.
It's a good addiction! I got hooked nearly 8 years ago.
The attachment shows two GPUs, each one core of 9800GX2 card, performing at better 6K PPD.
Just throwing that out there.
My old laptop was too slow to run SMP in Windows, so I put 8.04 on it and just let it churn. It only got 700ppd or so, but it's way better than nothing.
Do you have any links concerning such problems? I'm not challenging you, I just want help steer you in the right direction.
The 9600GSO is alright for just farming out if you can find a good deal on them. When in contrast 9600GSO xfx card(don't like their ref boards) is $78 while a new 9800GTX is $150. It is double the price for double the production. Then if you are looking at that you can find 9800GX2s for 300 or less and that is a 10-12k ppd card by itself. This all really depends on if you have the power supply for it and how much money you want to sink into this.
The 9600GSO out performs all ati cards excluding a x2 and cheap for the ppd produced. They are not doing so well on the newer WUs and since the newest set has hit the cards my 8800 GTs' are pushing up to 5700; they can be had shipped for roughly 120ish. Over the years the 88s have held up. After buying two 9600GSOs for 180 shipped, freaking had to pay for 3-saturday delivery was a sweet afternoon project though, I kind of wish I had just bought a 9800GTX so I could save a few dollars now and have another spare video slot to put in another GTX later.
Quad-intel. For all instances. With the current cuda drivers you do not load CPU cores in order to run GPU2 clients which allows you to run SMP on all cores and run dual SMPs if you want to. Intel is just faster and worth the price.
my 4850 can do 4.2k ppd. the gap between nvidia and ati seems to be closing somewhat. from the figures i see around the net, anyway.
i am half considering waiting for the next generation of cheap nvidias to start this folding box project actually. if you ask me, taking a previous gen gpu and just changing the 8 to a 9 is a bloody con job.
i was thinking of a pure GPU folding box, 2 9600gsos or 9800gt's because if i can just drop an amd athlon x2 in there id save a bunch of money. but that quad intel really seems tempting.
ATI is a wild card...pardon the pun. The high end Nvidia and ATI offerings essentially are at parity in the gaming arena, just based on which games the consumer prefers. I don't see ATI catching up with Nvidia in Folding for a long time due to significant nano-scale architecture differences.
So, you'll be happy to know that Nvidia is going to be re-branding G92 again to the GTS 200 series.
To make a long story short, if the story turns out to be accurate, Nvidia will be doing with the "240" and "250" what the original intent was to be with the 9800 series. That is, the 9800 GPUs were to be the 55nm die shrink of the 8800 series 65nm die. Well, Nvidia fumbled that one, but went ahead anyway and renamed the GPUs. Maybe they actually will get it right this time.
You don't need to do any manual settings changes for affinities. Just download and install Affinity Changer for dual client SMP Folding. Affinity Changer is load balancing tool that keeps the WinSMP requirement shifting to the different cores that are under utilized. (It's not necessary, but production will increase significantly.) If you are really adventurous, you could run two SMP clients under a virtual Linux layer within Windows - VMWare. You'd see a 30-40% better production that than directly running on Windows. On that topic, I know about it but don't know how to do it. But with multi-client SMP Folding, Linux and OSX are the kings.
Sorry the GPU Folding didn't work out. One of the nice things about the FAH project is that there are clients for just about any hardware/software configuration around.
That looks interesting. Maybe we were writing about the same thing. I believe I'll give that a try!
Magic, I'm working on it (VMWAre + Notrfreds) now on another Windows platform. I'll report what I find in a new thread. Thanks for getting my interest perked. I had not realized that there was an easy route to VMWare virtual machine Folding.