Rich, What Are You Folding On?

The amount of points that you put up for the team is staggering. With that said, how do you do it?

 

This is an open discussion, anyone contributing to the team should feel free to post their rig here.

1 comment

    • Rich Seyfert on December 17, 2013 at 8:06 pm
    • Reply

    Good evening and happy to let you look under the hood.

    Most of the horsepower comes from 2 ea GTX-590s in SLI. The CPU is a 1st generation Intel i7-x990, with only 3 cores (6 threads) dedicated to folding. That leaves the other 3 cores available for housekeeping, email and iTunes. Since Stanford has not yet written code optimized for GTX Titan/780s, there is really no push to spend more money right now. The motherboard is an ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer with 12GB of RAM in Windows 7, which supports the 4-way SLI from the video cards. I could probably get away with 6GB; however, virus checking and system backups sometimes give me low memory notices when they run at 12GB, so that is about as low as it goes. Plus I noticed that folding is slightly memory lossy and requires a reboot now and then to reclaim memory space.

    The tech is pretty dated now, as I’m told the better point:watt ratio systems are 64 core (4 ea 16 core) AMD server boxes that can run the -bigadv tasks like this thread talks about: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/57192-the-ultimate-folding-rig/page-2. However I think my next build will be a simple HTPC, so that I can move iTunes off of Tesla and cut the TV cable bill.

    If you are looking to add video cards for folding or just play games, I understand that the BitCoin community is moving away from graphics cards in favor of ASICs and FPLAs especially designed for doing hashes quickly. You might find good deals for these cards on eBay and Craig’s List. You will want to look for the AMD Radeon HD cards, since those were better at BitCoin then the NVidia cards.

    Anyway, take care, God bless and be safe.

    For His glory,

    Rich

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