WHS / F@H box

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I have had my quad-GPU F@H rig mothballed for the summer, but it's getting colder, and my heat doesn't seem to function well, so I'm pulling it out again. Watch out.

Anyways, I had planned to run it as a combo WHS box, and run folding on it too. I finally ordered a real copy (formerly only had free 180 day trial copy) of WHS to install. I never tried the trial copy, but I have confidence that F@H GPU will run on it.

The last thing that I did to it was to install 4GB of RAM into it, although it's rather pointless, as with all of those GPUs, I only get 2.25GB of RAM in Windows. But at least it's running in dual-channel.

I also have some 1TB WD Green HDs coming in the mail. The case is an Antec 300, and the OS drive is a WD Caviar Blue 640GB 6400AAKS. The only problem that I forsee, is that there was an issue with some of the SATA ports being covered up by the video cards. I will have to see how many free (and usable) SATA ports I have. I ordered four HDs. I think that the board has six SATA ports, plus two SAS/SATA ports on a Promise controller. I never installed the Promise drivers and have it turned off in the BIOS, for simplicity.

 

[filibusterman]

You forgot to add what gpus you have in there!! How do you properly cool that box with all those cards?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Interesting. I'd like to see how this works out. My WHS box is the only box that doesn't crunch in my house, but then again it also has a very low end processor on it.

 

[mgpaulus]

I have an Opteron 148 in my WHS box, crunching away just fine right now. It's probably the most idle of all my boxes. I also have an Opty 165 coming to upgrade this box, so hopefully I'll be able to run the SMP client on it. (This is the last single core machine in the house, except for the wife's laptop, which doesn't crunch for a whole lot of reasons....)

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just hope that you don't have to RDP into the box to manage it, I hope that there is a console GUI that can be run directly, because RDP screws up F@H bigtime because it changes the video adaptor to a virtual one, out from under the programs.
I've tested VNC, and it works, as long as you don't install the "mirror" driver. So I'm going to be installing and using that.

The GPUs are just four single-slot 9600GSOs. I used to have a couple of Asus dual-slot 9600GSOs in the top slots, but without an air gap between the cards, they heat up way too much. I burned out one of them, with temps around 90C for two weeks. Now I have two PNY 768MB and two EVGA 384MB. All have 96SP.

With a Antec 300, with Antec TriCool fans on high in all of the fan spots, and with GPU fans all on high, temps don't exceed 60C on any of the GPUs.

That was one other problem with the Asus GPUs, RivaTuner couldn't control the fan speed, and it just wouldn't ramp up on it's own.

 

[mgpaulus]

I run console version installed as service on all my windows boxes. And, come to think of it, on all my linux boxes as well That's just a mental/philosophical holdover from my SETI days, when the console client was much more efficient than the GUI based client.

 

[Drsignguy]

Nice to see you dusted off the cobwebs from that Rig VL. Great to hear that you have made some improvements to get that monster up and running again. I remember the troubles you were having with the heat issues. Hope the improvements made will have much better results.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah. I had it running during last years F@H race, that was kind of fun, but then I needed the room to plug in some other computers, so I shut it down. I ran it again for a short time, but the RAM burned out or something. At least, it wouldn't boot until I replaced the RAM. (Thought I had burned out another video card at first. I started a thread about that here a while ago.)

So then after I replaced the RAM and tested it, I guess I just let it sit there because of the summer months.

It's not quite as powerful as it used to be, I'm sure a couple of GTX 285 cards could beat four 9600GSOs, but it was a fun project getting it working.

Hopefully my WHS will be here in a few days, and then I can set it up again.

 

[filibusterman]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I just hope that you don't have to RDP into the box to manage it, I hope that there is a console GUI that can be run directly, because RDP screws up F@H bigtime because it changes the video adaptor to a virtual one, out from under the programs.
I've tested VNC, and it works, as long as you don't install the "mirror" driver. So I'm going to be installing and using that.

The GPUs are just four single-slot 9600GSOs. I used to have a couple of Asus dual-slot 9600GSOs in the top slots, but without an air gap between the cards, they heat up way too much. I burned out one of them, with temps around 90C for two weeks. Now I have two PNY 768MB and two EVGA 384MB. All have 96SP.

With a Antec 300, with Antec TriCool fans on high in all of the fan spots, and with GPU fans all on high, temps don't exceed 60C on any of the GPUs.

That was one other problem with the Asus GPUs, RivaTuner couldn't control the fan speed, and it just wouldn't ramp up on it's own.

Yea I think I have the same problem with the gpu fans not increasing speed by themselves as well. I don't know what the default temp for ramp up is but the default 30% or whatev for a card above 70C seems too high for me why not get the fan going to 70-80 and cool it to the high 50s? The ramp up does not seem to occur with my galazy or PNY but it may be a software issue since manual adjustment in ntune works fine.