Folding Forum

I am looking into building a workstation to fold with and I have a question. The workstation I am looking at can be equipped with PNY NVIDIA® RTX™ A400, 727 - 1762MHz, 4GB GDDR6. Along with an ASUS GeForce RTX™ 3060 DUAL-RTX3060-O12G-V2, 1320 - 1867MHz, 12GB GDDR6. I am looking for information in the PYN graphics cards and how they perform at folding and any snags I may come across with something like that. I know the 3060 should work as intended but I am just unfamiliar with the other cards. Any help would be appreciated.



Thanks
Ryan

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-a400.c4212
Rtx 2050 is desktop counterpart for that PNY card

muziqaz wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2025 4:41 pm https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-a400.c4212
Rtx 2050 is desktop counterpart for that PNY card

At least for the website I am using to have it built, an option to do a swap like that is not an option.

viewtopic.php?t=42381

Above is a thread requesting whitelisting of the A400 (4GB presumably). So presumably it is OK to fold, though I can find no A400 data (or for that matter RTX 2050 data) on Lar systems.

At https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-a400.c4212 its relative performance is estimated as a lot lower than (say) my GTX 1060 (6GB) (=2.46x) which yields me maybe 600K PPD - but the A400 is much more modern in various ways whose relationship to Fah performance I can't guess at.

Geekbench6 opencl performance of the A400 scores 22840, as against GTX 1060 (6GB) = 36525 and RTX 2060 = 76606. These relative GB6 scores aren't directly related to folding performance, but the general ordering is likely true.

In summary the A400 seems to fold and I would guess somewhere between 400K-600K PPD, which is OK for a single slot card after all.

It is a bad idea to invest in super old hardware specifically for folding.
A400 is bottom of the barrel card to display desktop. It is not meant for compute and will be a paperweights, nothing else

It is of course

a bad idea to invest in super old hardware specifically for folding.

Indeed, in some ways it is a bad idea to invest in any hardware specifically for folding, especially if like me your idea of a good game is Freecell and you are happy with the gaming performance of the Firepro V3700 in Z802. But luckily all my own super-old hardware is from pre-retirement number crunching, with some cheap pre-loved GPUs from eBay for folding just for the fun of seeing what the mothball flotilla can do.

That said, the original inquiry was from Ryan, who it seems is already the owner of an impressive lineup of folding-capable devices:

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER

and thus knows that a 3060 would work as intended.

But the A400 has a different intended use case. At https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/design-vis ... bfbfb49f10 I find that the A400 is a fairly recent addition (release Sept 2024) to the "Ampere" lineup of Quadro-style certified GPUs from NVIDIA (release ~2020-2021), so it is not "super old". It is also entry level for a wide range of "pro" graphics-related applications where a customer - or professional certification - might require the Quadro-style cards because - as NVIDIA puts it:

RTX desktop products feature ... certification for over 100 professional applications.

I am not sure if Fah is a "professional application" in NVIDIA's sense, but certification for other purposes tends to suggest that such a card would not get the science of Fah too far wrong.

Whether one calls the A400 entry level or the bottom of a particular "certification" barrel, to call it a "paperweight" is probably going too far. Even the Quadro 400's and Quadro 600's and Quadro K620's that came with my HP Z-series workstations were still working last time I used them, and the Quadro 5000 is still alive and well though the Quadro 4000s were definitely paperweights even when new.

But if the ONLY purpose is to fold, since Fah checks the product and donors have no responsibility for the results, the 3060 is heaps better.

It is not a bad idea to invest in more modern hardware for FAH, since with every generation FAH performance scales well
At the same time the older the generation the worse fall off there is, including driver support exclusion.
Old hardware makes sense only when you already own it and just want it to do something instead of sitting on the shelf

Thanks for the input everyone! Decided to not go this route. The feedback is apparated.