Folding Forum

With 8x " gtx 1060" no output cards for mining, would f@h recognize them for folding ? Ive got a wicked deal for mobo, 8x gpu and psu.

Thanks

Think you may have issues with PCIe lanes ... FaH works gpus harder than mining and requires more support per gpu from the cpu ... some of the mainstream gpu folders will no doubt weigh in with fuller guidance/comments

As mentioned the PCIE lanes will be a bottle neck, next will be the operating system which will probably need to be linux. Running multiple card will also multiply any heat issues so will need to be run in the open at least.
Not many people have been successful with folding more than 4 cards on a single board and 8 is very much at fuzzy edge of possibility.
I don't wish to dissuade you from trying but mining rigs don't translate to folding rigs so well. Those cards should be fine although they will be GTX 1060 equivalents built for mining with no outputs and some people have had issues with IDing some versions most I have read about do work. It may end up a 4 gpu rig and you sell or use the other gpu's elsewhere.

Its thread per gpu right or only actual cores ?

r0k0 wrote:Its thread per gpu right or only actual cores ?

A while ago I would have said 1 thread per GPU needed in Windows but less of an issue in Linux, now we are seeing workunits that are much hungrier for CPU resources at least at some point during the run than that and I would always allow one 'real' core per gpu at least.
I guess if this a mining rig it has a slow dual core CPU, no?

Dont know yet, i just picked it up, will check tonight, i would only run gpu wu on this system anyways

r0k0 wrote:Dont know yet, i just picked it up, will check tonight, i would only run gpu wu on this system anyways

GPUs will need some CPU resources. Have a play and see how you go, good luck.

Might be worth running it with one gpu initially to get a rough baseline ppd then adding one gpu at a time and seeing what ppd you get at each step ... fairly sure you will find a point at which adding more gpus just isn't adding anything overall (and maybe losing throughput) ... but I have always worked experimentally rather than logically ... there will be some variation across WUs but you should be able to get a feel for it.

ok so 1 cpu is a i3 7100, the other a Celeron G3930, both motherboard have 4GB DDR4-2400 and m.2 120GB SSD.

after reading what you guys said i went back and picked up a second motherboard... dude was selling the board, cpu, ram and ssd for 20$ !

picked up 2x 2000W Gold series power supply for 50$ each and 8x p106-100 with dvi output for 50$ each

r0k0 wrote:ok so 1 cpu is a i3 7100, the other a Celeron G3930, both motherboard have 4GB DDR4-2400 and m.2 120GB SSD.

after reading what you guys said i went back and picked up a second motherboard... dude was selling the board, cpu, ram and ssd for 20$ !

picked up 2x 2000W Gold series power supply for 50$ each and 8x p106-100 with dvi output for 50$ each

That's a good pile of parts there, should be able to make something good out of all that. The i3 has 2 cores/4 threads so that looks more promising.

It's my understanding that you have 3 motherboards now with each one having PCI-E 3.0 running at 8x speed? On Windows, PCI-E 3.0 at 8x is the lowest speedy while Linux IIRC is PCI-E 3.0 at 4x speed. I have read reports that for some WUs, you would need 2 threads per GPU. Also, 4 GBs of RAM for a system with 4 GPUs might be pushing it since I would say that some WUs need 2 GB of RAM per GPU plus a bit for the OS.

I would start off with one system with the best parts put together and start off with 2 GPUs. See what the baseline is and if you're not maxing out the CPU/RAM, add another GPU until you hit a limit (CPU, RAM, heat, Power, PCI-E, etc.) Then repeat this process with the left over parts. Just keep track of the system for few weeks to ensure that you can fold all the various WUs from different Projects. If you encounter issues with a project, either remove a GPU to free up resources or post here for help.

Assuming that the hardware was treated well (low dust build up, low operating temperatures, etc.) it will last for a while folding

i was going to only use 1 for 8 gpus but like mention i wont have enoughpcie lanes, would a i7 6700 or 7700 would for that much ? if not im going to cancel the project and just use it for mining instead, learn it and profit from it while keeping my HP workstation... i was hoping to sell the HP's and only run 1 or 2 towers with either 8 or 4 cards each for folding.

also the motherboard is made for 12 gpus, 8 of those being regular 16x slots ( probably 8 or 4x ? ) and 4 1x lanes for risers, its very very long so would be ugly as hell running only 2 gpus on it , might as well buy an matx board haha

Currently, the maximum number of GPUs in a single system is 10 without any CPU Slots. Thus, having 12 GPUs in a single system isn't possible.

As long as you address the power, cooling, PCI-E lanes and CPU requirement, you should be able to fold on 10 GPUs but that is an interesting project so keep us updated if you do decide to go down that path

As suggested I would start with the 'best' board and cpu and perhaps 2 GPUs add extra GPUs 1 at a time and see how the performance goes, you may get to a stage where adding an extra gpu results in no increase in performance but that point is unpredictable. I would hazard a guess that with the i3 and both sticks of RAM you will start to see bottle necking after 4 GPUs but even with bottle necking you should be able to add a couple more GPUs at least. This is guessing though and you will see where that point of no further benefit cuts in. An i7 would give you some more CPU resources and probably allow more GPUs but it would be interesting to see how the i3 goes.

Should i run linux or windows 10 ?