Folding Forum

There are big servers like DL580 with over 40 cores for sale fairly cheap, are they worth the work for cpu WU? what setup do you suggest?

The machines I built a couple years ago were HP Z440 workstations with E5-2690 v4 CPUs. It was about $500 for a barebones workstation, CPU and an SSD. Now it's down to under $300 for that build. FAHControl shows PPD estimates of 400-450K on Linux for most work units. The LAR database shows very low numbers for this CPU for some reason, so the PPD numbers there aren't reliable.

My i7-13700K on performance cores mostly shows estimates of around 650K PPD and even my 7950X with 85C temp limit estimates 900K-1.1M most of the time, so 400K is still pretty good, if a bit less efficient power-wise.

It looks like older Ryzen 7 or 9 CPUs are still over $100 on the used market. Can't comment on PPD numbers for those.

Below is an example of a workstation that would require your choice of Xeon CPU (WUs currently don't utilize more than 16 cores and all-core clock speed matters), a 250-500GB SATA SSD, a cheap GPU like a Quadro NVS 295 unless you also want to fold on GPU. The 700W PSU has an 18A power rail, two 6-pin PCIe and two SATA cables that can power any GPU with two 8-pins if you use dual 6-pin to 8-pin and dual SATA to 8-pin adapters.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/384284924158?V ... 4284924158

There may also be deals on Dell Precision or Lenovo Thinkstation builds for people who aren't HP fans and want to run Xeons. See greenpcgamers.com and their YouTube channel for howto info.

So the best cpu filler criteria is one slot every 16 cores (not threads) ?

Most Windows versions have a 32 thread limit. Neither Linux nor MacOS have that limit, but it appears the researchers plan for Windows.

At times in the past there have been CPU projects that would scale over more than 32 processors, but currently just a few from a group of test projects for core A9 are large enough. Some of the larger other CPU projects will scale over 16 processors, but others will se a performance "knee" at around 12-16 processor threads.

The 32 thread limit in Windows is related to the programming tools used to create the v7 client and the various requirements MS has for processes to use more than 32 threads. The latest I recall is that all dependencies were fixed in the CPU folding core, so it potentially could use more than 32, but the process spawned by the client is limited to 32 on Windows.