Hello everyone,

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we made some upgrades today to keep up with the times. Since it is now clear that there is little future left in keeping GTX2xx series cards for GPU folding, we today eliminated that impending problem. One pair of EVGA GTX-470 cards for an i7 machine build and named for our daughter, Donna, was first. Second was the purchase of a second GTX-460 for what has always been a special friend of mine, a 3.5 Ghz Q6600 based machine named Butch.

These changes in sum do not add up to much in the grand scheme of things but it had to be done with the future in mind and for our daughter. A folder should start their offspring off early, you know!!

I had intended to post pictures of Donna and her computer with daddy, but that is a little more personal on the net than I am comfortable with. Brad doesn't mind if his picture is out there but I forbid him from posting any of me because of who I resemble. He may post pictures of himself and Donna if he wishes.

Anyway, it is all for the team, which is definitely a very surprising and far more rewarding experience than I ever dreamed of. With my first day at the old "roost" being such a nasty experience, Fold4Life is all the more attractive and it grows by the day. The old roost is increasingly recognized by its own members being a virtually dead "roost". That is very sad but anyone who has been there from the beginning knew it was to be.

Connie

I know what you mean. Going to out of town for fours day, my 7 year old son will be watch the farm for me. (He's not afraid of terminal windows, either!) Good upgrades there, looks like an additional 12 ~ 15,000 PPD. Geez, I gotta get that 460. (Still folding with a 9800GT!)

Yep, definitely a better roost here!

Thanks for the update. Still teetering on my end on when to cut those gpus loose.

Never got into naming my hardware...folding hardware that is I try to keep it all business so there are no hard feelings when I sell.

The 460 cards are pretty nice. We have one with 768 megs of memory, the other with a full gig. I don't see any difference in output at all with everything else being equal. The 460 is good for just under 11K PPD with the shaders at 1480, which is where ours top out. Beyond that, we get errors. They are about the same price as GTX260-216 models right now so it is a pretty good deal and a good time to make the switchover. Now I need to talk Brad into building another i7 machine to hold two more 470 cards!!

Connie

And that is???

I won't say who she is either!!

Thank you. Brad isn't one to name his rigs either but Butch was something else. Back when it was rare to see a Q6600 reach 3.5 Ghz without having to do anything but raise the bus clock. It will go even faster but the temperature rises very quickly beyond 3.5 Ghz. He is one tough little machine having folded like that for years on end without so much as a whimper. That same chip is now on a GA-EP45T-USB3R with a pair of GTX-460 cards. It is still a very respectable and rock stable machine after all this time, even though the CPU is easly overshadowed by a good pair of GPUs. Brad gave to me when we married, then I named him Butch for his toughness. Then the others, one by one. Now he can't look at HFM and know which machine is which any more!!

Connie

Brad here....

We're building yet another i7 box. Same as the others, i7-930 at 4.1 Ghz or more (we're betting), 24 gigs of ram, Gigabyte X58-UD9 board this time, and a Lian-Li case so we can stuff more than two 470's on the thing. It will be dual boot like the rest of the farm, 64 bit Unix primary. And I get to name this one, babe!

Brad

It must have a secondary purpose???

Yes, all of the i7 machines are dual boot with unix primary and 24 gigs of memory because there are times, in our work, often done at home, when even our Sun dual quad opteron workstations can't do it all in real time without a little extra oomph. The i7 folders give us that with very little if any visible effect on our output. The secret is just dividing up the extra workload just right and giving chunks of it to the other rigs on the LAN. We watch to try and find any obvious effect on output, but as one's daily farm total rises, so does the normal day to day variations, so the effect of having them do other things as well is damn hard to see a hint of because it doesn't last for more than an hour or two a day, and never involves the GPU clients. Just another idea along the distributed computing line.

Brad

You know I remember folding with 5600+ dual core, 1Gig of ram 7Gb hard drive. Folding SMP on ubuntu.
Man how things have changed


73, Larry

They sure have. I don't know where all the time went either. My memory is really shot this year. I remember starting on a MSI KT133 based board with an athlon 1900. Later went to a XP2600 overclocked to 2.6 Ghz, all single core folding in a shell under Free BSD back then. I can't remember the exact date I started but I'm pretty sure it was before June of 2004 which is what EOC says. 50 PPD was pretty decent back then, now we complain about p6701's and their measly sub 10K returns. Things have definitely changed big time.

Brad