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- Thread starter Scott Greczkowski
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Ok I have it running on two machines now. It seems like I am getting a few 1000 more a day according to it. Could just be the WU I have right now though. This is still on a 970 and 960, don't have a 10xx series.....yet.
Congratulations to Scott Greczkowski for passing 40,000,000 Points!!!
Meanwhile, down in the Foxbat Folding Den:
View attachment 119585
It's good to be the King...
Although this post over on the FoldingForum makes me wonder about the sanity (or bank account) of the Folding Community: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=29057&view=unread#p287948
That one machine currently out-Folds our entire Team. Hey, king3pj, when are you going to get tired of playing "No Man's Sky" and start Folding on your GTX 1070?
Weird... I don't remember ever getting the notification that I was tagged in this. I just happened to browse this thread today and saw it. I do want to try folding on this 1070 just to see how it compares to my old SLI 970 system. My guess is the SLI 970s will be a little better since that is the case with games that support SLI to it's full potential. I'm still happy with the upgrade because the 1070 performs better in most games and it uses half the power of my old system.
I'm probably not going to do any folding with it until after the air conditioning is off for the summer though.
I'm thinking of playing with this on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a test rig at work. Hopefully it goes well. It looks like one feature might be the ability to mix AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in a single system!
FAH doesn't make use of SLI, so your pair of GTX 970s would be treated as just that, a pair of GTX 970s. Right now, my GTX 970 in my Mac Pro 1,1 is running at a predicted 345K PPD. That's on a PCIe Gen1 x16 slot being pushed by a 2.66 GHz Xeon 5120 (if memory serves me correctly) so it would probably do better on a new CPU and MB combo.
Over in my Dell T7400, my GTX 1070 is crunching at 645K PPD, but I've seen it up to 800K (predicted by FAHControl)
OK, I'm a glutton for punishment, I just installed 7.4.15. One immediate problem surfaced that I noticed in the folding forums; I have two 970's and slot one was running fine but the second kept erroring out with "05:40:27:ERROR:WU01:FS02:Failed to start core: OpenCL device matching slot 2 not found". The fix? Configure -> Slots -> Gpu2 and change the three indexes from -1 to 1. Then pause and restart the offending slot. Supposedly this is only an issue if you have two of the same gpu's in one box.
Hopefully they can get they straightened out before the final release. I've not had that issue since my cards were acquired one at a time over the years.
After the "fun" trying to shoe-horn two GPUs into the Dell's case and the vast heat it now pumps out, I'm now weighing the pros and cons of building a Folding rig from scratch. Another weakness the Dell has is its power supply which is a unique Dell part and if it dies, I'm screwed. My problem is I've been spoiled by the dual-CPU workstations I've been using as hosts and the vast number of PCI-e lanes they provide. All the single-CPU MBs I look at today seem to be supporting multiple PCI-e x16 slots, but can only run 16 lanes if one slot is in use, otherwise they split to 8x8, or 8x4x8, something that doesn't give you two x16 slots with both having 16 lanes.
For gaming there is no, or very little, performance impact when you use PCIe 3.0 x8 instead of PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. On the vast majority of systems SLI uses x8 for both cards for the exact reason you mentioned. There just aren't enough lanes for x16. AMD cards only require x4 PCIe slots for their crossfire setups. I don't know if performance is the exact same when folding since, like you said, it isn't using SLI but my guess is that it's very close.
If you really care about increasing the number of PCIe lanes available you need to get on the Intel X99 platform. It's expensive at $600 but the i7 6850k supports 40 PCIe lanes. This means you can run two GPUs at PCIe 3.0 x16 and one at PCIe 3.0 x8. The CPU itself is also pretty beefy with 6 cores and 12 threads thanks to hyperthreading.
Amazon product ASIN B01FJLAITC
The other downside, besides the CPU price, is that most X99 motherboards are about twice as expensive as the more mainstream Z170 motherboards. This one isn't terrible at $220 with 4 PCIe 3.0 x16 slots.
Amazon product ASIN B00V4V4SFC
Here is the choice I would make if you don't necessarily care about folding on your CPU as well as the GPUs though. If you go with the X99 motherboard platform you can also use the low end server Xeons. The Xeon E5-2603V3 has 6 cores and supports up to 40 PCIe x16 lanes but only costs $200.
Amazon product ASIN B00M1BUY7K
There are obviously some downsides when compared to the i7-6850k to go with the price difference. First it doesn't have hyperthreading so you get 6 threads instead of 12 even though they are both 6 core CPUs. Second, it's designed for server use so it's clock speed is only 1.6GHz instead of 3.6GHz on the i7. My guess is that 6 cores at this speed would still be plenty to keep 3 or even 4 GPUs (running at x8) happily folding at full speed. If you want to do CPU folding in addition to the GPUs the i7-6850k with 12 threads at 3.6GHz would likely blow it away though.
Edit: All links are from the Sat Guys Amazon link.
Ah, I fell victim to the "bigger numbers are better" and thought the Z170 > X99 boards. Thanks for enlightening me! And my wife told me today that we get 5% cash-back on Amazon purchases... Win-win?
Yeah Intel has a lot of different motherboard types and it can be tricky to sort them all out. With the current Skylake and Broadwell CPUs these are the categories as I understand them.
The B150 motherboards are the most bare-bones Skylake motherboards available. I think the B probably stands for business because they are usually in cheaper office PCs.
The H110 and H170 motherboards are good choices for standard PC builds or gamers who don't want to do a lot of tinkering in the bios. I think H likely stands for home.
The Z170 motherboards are higher end home user motherboards. These are the ones required for people who want to overclock their Intel k series CPUs. This can't be done on the lower end motherboards. I'm not positive on this part but I think the Z series motherboards are the only home motherboards that support SLI too. I have no clue what the Z is supposed to stand for.
Then there are the X99 motherboards. While the rest of the motherboards I mentioned were for Skylake CPUs these are the ones that support Broadwell. This is where you are going to find the high end, professional CPUs ranging from 6 cores/12 threads to 10 cores/ 20 threads. That 10 core/ 20 thread CPU will only cost you folders $1650 by the way. I would guess that the X stands for extreme.
Just over a day until we overwhelm ComputerBase for #65. Another month until we overtake xtremesystems. 
The day is here! Mere hours away, now. Stanford shows us 500K behind as I type this. Probably by the next EOC update in 150 minutes.Just over a day until we overwhelm ComputerBase for #65. Another month until we overtake xtremesystems.
All of their Base belong to us... What, too dated?...and looks like we have done it.
Not at all, see post 4099.
Good to see I'm not the only old fart here.In that vein, my Church will be getting a new sign with an electronic reader board this fall, I know it's going to say that at least once.
