Folding Forum

Hi
I am planing to build a new computer for folding@home with those parts:
ASUS Z97-WS
Palit GeForce GTX 970
Seagate Momentus SpinPoint - 500GB
Intel Core i7-4790K Devils Canyon - Box
Kingston HyperX Fury DDR3-1866
Corsair RM1000 Gold - 1000W PSU

My long time plan is to put more than just 1 GPU in it and I dont plan to overcloack. The reason for the K model is higher basecloack.

I have some qestions for you:
1: Should I get a geforce 980 instead of a 970? What card does yield the best PPD/Dollar?
2: Is 1000 W PSU good enough? The reason I stick to this is that a 1500 W cost twice as much as 1000 W and therefore I could get 2 PSU of 1000W instead of 1500 W if I need more power.
3: I am compelty lost for the case. Any recomendation? I prefere if I could get it at the local dealer; proshop.dk/
4: If we only talk about PPD/dollar is there then any recomendations?

1. PPD/dollar wise - 970
2. It will be plenty. My build consumes a maximum of 400W under 100% load
3. Up to you - get something with decent airflow which you like
4. I don't think so - I get about 285K+ PPD on my (oc'ed) 970. If you don't plan to overclock getting a K CPU is not a sound investment from a price perspective, but your call.

1. I would point out that the current versions of cores 17 and 18 likely aren't optimized for the Maxwell architecture, which could change in the future. From the reports I've seen, it appears the 980 is only slightly faster at folding than the 970. Since the 980 has roughly 25% more shaders, I would guess that the cores aren't making optimal use of the 980 right now. I could be wrong, and of course I can't predict how much better the performance might get if I'm right. The 970 is definitely the best value right now given it's ~$200 cheaper and is only about 5% slower as things currently stand.

3. I always check Newegg's and Amazon's customer reviews for parts I'm thinking of buying, with a heavier weight on the former, even if I end up buying elsewhere.

4. I'm not sure I'd go for an i7 at all if it's a folding-only box since I wouldn't be folding on the CPU. CPU folding just isn't very cost-effective right now, and I don't think that's going to improve in the near future. When I was folding on my 3770k at 4.3 GHz, at best I was getting 25k PPD, and I was usually seeing around 18k. With a Haswell i7 that might get up to 30k, but when you're comparing that with the ~280k a 970 can get it's not overly impressive. Keep in mind each GPU needs a free thread. If you dropped down to one of the ~$190 i5s you'd still have four cores, albeit without HT, and the $150 you save is over 40% of the cost of another 970. If you were definitely going to top out at 2 GPUs you could probably go with an i3 and still not be bottlenecking the cards.

970 would be the best PPD pr $ by far. Now and for later.

Your bottleneck would be the 1150. It will not allow more than 2 PCIe 3.0 x8. And with that in mind i5 would be a better choice. And you do not need 1000W PSU.

750W PSU will do just fine, and you will have power to spare.

All in all, this would be the best way to go. PPD pr $

It would be expensive to build a folding rigg with more than 2 GPUs. Hardware is expensive, and heat will be a enemy.

This case is amazing:

Corsair Carbide Air 540 - http://www.proshop.dk/Kabinet/Corsair-C ... 13039.html

Hi
Thank you for the advices.

The reason why I did (original) choice a I7 over an I3 was that then I would get 8 "cores" instead of 4 cores. Then I could use 4 cores (for for each GPU) and still have 4 cores left for forlding.

Sn1ken: you are aware of that the Z97-WS has quad x8 and not 2 as most motherboards ( http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z97WS/specifications/ ). That is why I did choice that Motherboard over the rest

But the i7 has only 16 bit PCI express lanes

-Expansion Options
PCI Express Revision 3.0
PCI Express Configurations ‡ Up to 1x16, 2x8, 1x8/2x4
Max # of PCI Express Lanes 16

http://ark.intel.com/products/80807/Int ... o-4_40-GHz

The extreme i7 have 40 lanes, but different socket ...

I am a bid confused. Intel do say that it should support op to 2 16x8-ports while Asus do say it support op to 4 16x8 ( even the manual to that motherboard claims support for 4 gpu ( http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/soc ... Z97_WS.pdf ). I am unsure how they can do this if the chipset/cpu only supports 2 16X8. Is it only me who are confused?

Hope this clarify the issue for your sake. 1150 is limited to 16 lanes for CPU to Motherboard.

Better to find out now than be disappointed afterwards.

That is why my statement regarding 2 Nvidia GPUs in one rigg is the best PPD pr $
If you chose another socket 2011-3 you need the right CPU to support 40 lanes. This cost money, and as I stated earlier the heat will be causing GPU to throttle.

I have been looking into this myself, and I know what I am talking about.

Look at my signature.

Yes, none of the Z97 boards can increase the number of available lanes to the CPU. Some boards (like this one) use a PLX PCIe multiplexer which "virtualises" the number of lanes, but if you run into bandwidth issues your overall performance drops. None of this should matter unless you plan to use more than 2 video cards anyway, so if that's your reason you're better off with a cheaper board - 2x 970 cards on 8x PCI-E 3.0 will not hit a bottleneck, at worst you lose about 1% overall performance compared to 16x.