Budget Folding Rigs.

[Blergo]

Hey,
Anyone got any info on the AMD Sempron CPU's? the 2300+ is only £33 on ebuyer so they look like they might make very nice cheap folding rigs. just wondering if anyone has any experience with them? what core are they useing? would the performance drop or increase or stay the same if i were to swap my XP2400+ to a sempron 2300+? bearign in mind the 2400+ is a rubish o/c'er.
many thanks,
owen

[Blergo]

ok, i think i just answered that question for myself..lol

AMD Sempron 2300+ 1.583GHz 333FSB 256K

Model: AMD Sempron
Core: Thorton
Operating Frequency: 1.583GHz
FSB: 333MHz
Cache: L1/64K+64K; L2/ 256KB
Voltage: 1.65V
Process: 0.13Micron
Socket: Socket A
Multimedia Instruction: MMX, SSE, 3DNOW!, 3DNOW!+


so they look good for budget folders but not for an upgrade unless i get the 2800 and it clocks better than my XP2400. saying that the price of the 2800 is more than i can get an XP2600 for.. unless anyone knows diffrently ofcourse? :)
still might have to buy a couple of the 2300+ semprons to mess around with a bit, mabey see if i can get a dual socket A board and get them running as MP's as another folding rig. :)

owen

[Rodzilla]

Interesting... Does anyone have one of these?

[saaya]

its an athlonxp with locked multis... same thing, same cpu core :)

yes i have several of those and they fold nicely :D

you can find FSB400 capable boards for 30€ here in germany, and for 40€+ even nf2 FSB400 boards! so a sempron+nf2 for 80€ :slobber: thats def a very very sweat deal!

when it comes to folding boxes dualies are worth it i think, you only need one hdd and one psu and only one or two sticks of memory :)

there was an offer for 1.6ghz low volt xeons for 80$ each :eek: that would let you run 4 instances. jeff bought 3 pairs of them :D they oc to 2.6ghz+ on air :D def a very very sweet deal, unfortunately they ran out of chips... but you might find a sweet deal like this somewhere else :)

[Blergo]

i have been thinking and those chips run higher FSB at stock than my XP2400 so mabey the lower clock speed isnt as bad as i thought in comparison.
owen

EDIT: and yes, everythign is cheaper in germany, I lived in Obernburg am Main for 2 years, might go back soon for a visit, been a while since i visited all my friends.

[saaya]

time to visit ya pals! and bring some big bags with ya for all the hardware :D

i bought kt266a boards for 20€ a piece new, they do 166fsb easy and they are as fast as nf2 boards at the same fsb! plus those boards support sd and ddr ram :D lan onboard already, so great for cheap folding rigs :D

[Rodzilla]

:lol: so if I wanted to build a duel rig with these chips.... what would it cost American? :lol:

[Blergo]

haha! i usually mail stuff back home if i buy stuff in germany when i'm there, or i get my uncle to go buy it for me and mail it to me ;-)... shame D2OL dosnt have a multithreaded client, if they did i'd be upgradeign the CPU's in my cluster to semprons, instead of the duron 1.8's, the durons are great but the lack of cache is limiting my benchmarks on the cluster i think. You can find cheap motherboards over here too new, Ebuyer has a few cheap pc chips boards but nothing as cheap as you can get in germany.
owen

[Rodzilla]

Which core do I want?

And do these have HT?

Will these OC very well?
http://www.newegg.com/app/searchProductResult.asp?Submit=Go&Range=1&InnerCata=343&DEPA=0&bop=and&description=Sempron&Order=price

[Blergo]

the thorton core is a barton with half the cache and everyone knows the good ol' Thoroughbred core, not really sure how well they will o/c, that is pretty much what i was asking aswell. please explain what you mean by HT? these are socket A cpu's... from what i can tell basically identical to the Athlon XP's but they use a slightly diffrent PR rateing system (they are equivilent PR rateings compared to P4 celeron chips). the only thing i REALLY like about them is the price as they are cheaper that the duron applebred chips atm.
owen

[Blergo]

Foxdog,10/14/2004 1:34:58 AM

Picked one of these up a couple of weeks ago to play around with. OC'ed to 2.1 gig at default voltage. Not a bad little cpu for the bucks.


thats a review i copied of newegg for the 2500+ so who knows? obviously there are some wicked o/c'ing semprons out there. as with all cpu's though i guess its just down to luck, and i never seem to have any luck when i buy new cpu's..lol.. they are always rubish overclockers, my 2400+ for example becomes unstable at anything over about 2.3 but then that i think is more down to my ram and low 5V rail on my psu.
owen

[L0$t Pr0PhEt]

Foxdog,10/14/2004 1:34:58 AM

Picked one of these up a couple of weeks ago to play around with. OC'ed to 2.1 gig at default voltage. Not a bad little cpu for the bucks.


thats a review i copied of newegg for the 2500+ so who knows? obviously there are some wicked o/c'ing semprons out there. as with all cpu's though i guess its just down to luck, and i never seem to have any luck when i buy new cpu's..lol.. they are always rubish overclockers, my 2400+ for example becomes unstable at anything over about 2.3 but then that i think is more down to my ram and low 5V rail on my psu.
owen

yeah, if you get lucky they go 2200mhz @ 1.65v so its a good buy.

[Rodzilla]

yeah, if you get lucky they go 2200mhz @ 1.65v so its a good buy.

Can these be ran in boards that hold 2 cpus? Sorry... I'm a AMD n00b

[Blergo]

search the forums, i found a thread about useing them MP and aparently one guy checked and the MP bridge was closed so in theory if they are all like that they should work but im not sure if anyone has actually tried them or not yet.
owen

[100]

look in the blowout section, and btw, go for a celeron. I've been selling celerons in webservers for years, they work great and cost fraction of the price of other cpus.

[saaya]

even the latest super locked amd chips can be modded to duallies with some skill :D

and steven, no they dont have ht and throtons oc pretty nicely as they are bartons with half the cache disabled (256kb L2 cache) and they should oc to 2.2hz on air at least, 2.5ghz with some luck :) (2.2ghz > prescott@3ghz and 2.5ghz > 3.6ghz with the prescott running without HT of course, its the overall performence im referring to, i dont know how amd and intel cpus compare in folding, but i guess its the same?)

but running amd 32bit cpus in smp is very problematic... there are very few mp boards for them and they only oc to 140fsb... maybe 150 if your very lucky, and as the multis are locked on the new cpus your pretty screwed...

opterons are very fast in mp, but i think they cost a lot... but im not sure.

[Creep-DK]

i've seen 240 opterons go for about 250$ here in denmark, apperently they cut the price quite a bit on them, i think they used to cost about 350$ or so here, anyways if your going for opterons it has to be the 2xx coz 1xx cant run mp.

[Rodzilla]

i've seen 240 opterons go for about 250$ here in denmark, apperently they cut the price quite a bit on them, i think they used to cost about 350$ or so here, anyways if your going for opterons it has to be the 2xx coz 1xx cant run mp.

Hmmmmm.... maybe an arse load of single rigs would be better...

[Blergo]

look in the blowout section, and btw, go for a celeron. I've been selling celerons in webservers for years, they work great and cost fraction of the price of other cpus.

I already have a celeron 2.0 runing at 2.8 (think its my PSU holding me back as i get random reboots at anything higher but it goes into windows still and runs for varying lengths of time right up to 3.2 at stock volts) and im geting a celeron 2.6 any day now to mate up with a motherboard i found on my shelf :D BUT! the amd sempron cpu's are cheaper in the UK. and being identical to athlon xp's perform better aswell imo.
owen

[Creep-DK]

You will most certainly get more "bang for the buck" going for single rig setups Rodzilla no doubt about that.

[saaya]

yeah, when it comes to bang for the bug its amd xp/sempron rigs

cpu 50$ or less
mobo with la on board 40$ or less
stick of 2700 or 3200 ram 40$ or less
cheap case with 300W psu 40$ or less
hdd 10$ or less (5gb is enough and speed dont matter)
10$ for videocard or +10$ for a video integrated mobo

thats less than 200$ for an amd 3400+ or even faster folding machine :)

or you spend a little more (75-100$) and get an xpc style folding box :D
there are buy now offers on ebay for soltek QBiC and biostar iDEQ xpc copies for 200$.

they have video onboard and lan onboard and come with case and psu and cpu heatsink, all you need to add is a cpu and a stick of memory :) those things are tiny :D

and you can always stick in a nice videocard and sell it as a lan gaming rig for a good price, or you can add your own card to the tiny case and take it to a lan :D those cases are really tiny and perfect for lan parties :D


dont know if its possible to build cheap celeron D folding boxes and how well they perform... migth be worth a look :)

[Jeff]

The only problem is that equipment isn't that big of an expense... it's the cost of electricity in the long run that stops most people from farming. That's where dual-cpu rigs have a huge advantage.

[Blergo]

i have to agree with jeff on this one, BUT i dont pay the electricity bill so thats all good :) the main reason i am looking at dual cpu rigs now is space!! i have none left! but if i can say replace my XP2400+ with dual sempron then i have basically doubled my folding power from that 1 rig without haveing to add another rig which would take up space, i am concidering reinstalling the os's on the cluster and haveing them all run like standalone machines, that would add 6 duron 1.8's to my farm, all of which run from 2x 500Watt PSU's
owen

[saaya]

cpu 80W
gpu 10W (integrated graphics or old 2d cards)
memory 10W
hdd 10W
chipset 20W

single rig=130W
single rig x2= 260W
dual rig=210W

thats a rather pessimistic calculation, in fact the chipset memory and hdd usually consume less power wich means the difference between two single rigs and one dual rig is even less!

but lets also take into account that psus have a powerloss of around 30% when they transform electricity from ac to dc.

130W+30%=ac power consumption=what you really pay for
210W+30%=ac power conumption= what you really pay for

so we get an extra of 39W and an extra of 63W respectively.

130W+39W=169W x2=338W
210W+63W=273W


273W for a dually rig and 338W for two single cpu rigs...

id love to see somebody meassure the real power conumption of a single and a dually rig with a watt-o-meter though and post some real numbers of basically the same system, once with single and once with dual cpus :)

so its basically 280W vs 340W

so you save 30% electricity by running a dually rig compared to two equal built single systems. but a dually rig usually costs a lot more, the mainboard is very expensive and you need a better psu.

but if your thinking in the long run, duallies can be worth the extra system cost... it all depends on how much you pay for electricity...

[Creep-DK]

I must say its the electrical bill that keeps me from having my own little farm, electricity is damn expensive here :rolleyes:

[Jeff]

Sorry saaya, I've been around a long time and I know what I'm talking about with this. My dual Xeon is only consuming 228w right this second... and that's with an ATI Radeon 9200 in it. If I went back to my ATI Xpert 2000 then it'd be right around 210-215w.

My A64 setup, last I checked, was pulling ~185w with the ATI Xpert 2000 in it. I can't remember the exact overclock but that was using the same simple water setup I'm using now but it was a crappier overclocking chip so it was probably in the 2.35-2.45GHz range.

You simply can not beat a dual cpu setup in the long run. BTW, there comes a time when calculations and theory need a reality check. Your numbers, while they sound good, just don't add up when you measure actual power draw.

BTW, my electric is 12.1630 ¢/kwh during the day and 5.6370 ¢/kwh at night. I keep track of my electric usage in detail and have charts for the past 2 or 3 years that I can pull up to show you how much electricity 8 rigs use as opposed to 3 duals and 2 singles(which is where I'm at right now). These dual rigs are just way more efficient.


p.s. No offense meant by this post buddy. :toast:

[Jeff]

Ok, just moved my meter to the A64 rig that's running at 2.55GHz and it's pulling 216w. ;)

Production-wise in D2OL, the A64 is doing 25% more work as a single 2.7GHz Xeon. (last update was 46 candidates vs. 36 candidates) BUT the Xeon rig is running two 2.7GHz processors for only 10w more. (last update was 46 candidates vs 64 candidates) ;)

Now that is what I'm talking about. :p:

BTW, that 46 candidate update is out of the normal range for the A64 rig. It usually has 35-40 candidates every 6hrs. Don't know what happened there. :shrug: The Xeon rig is right in it's normal range of 60-65 per 6hr updates.

[Jupiler]

BTW, that 46 candidate update is out of the normal range for the A64 rig. It usually has 35-40 candidates every 6hrs. Don't know what happened there. :shrug: The Xeon rig is right in it's normal range of 60-65 per 6hr updates.

Jeff,

My A64 rig pulled 226 candidates the past 33 hours. So that makes about 41 cands / hour. Better than my 2.8 @ 3.7 (2 instances running), which pulled 175 candidates the past 22 hours.

[saaya]

yeah, numbers are numbers, thats why i asked if somebody can meassure the power draw on his systems :)

no offense taken :D

did you check my post again? i edited it 3 times because i got the numbers wrong :weird: was eating while calculating the numbers and was distracted by chatting with macci :lol:

you cant compare an a64 to a dual xeon rig :P

the xeon rig can run with only one cpu as well, right?
if you could meassure the power consumption of that dually with only one cpu compared to both cpus running it would give me better numbers to compare :)

could you do that? :D :toast:

or can somebody meassure the power consumption of his 3.6 (?) ghz northwood (your xeons are northwoods, right jeff?) without additional hdds and a power hungry videocard?

i think you jeff, meassuring the dually with one cpu would get us the best numbers as its the same vcore, same system setup andthe same videocard and same psu+ watt-o-meter :)

[Jeff]

Jeff,

My A64 rig pulled 226 candidates the past 33 hours. So that makes about 41 cands / hour. Better than my 2.8 @ 3.7 (2 instances running), which pulled 175 candidates the past 22 hours.

You mean 41 candidates/6hr update right? ;) That's about what I'm getting too.

And 226/33hrs and 175/22hrs work out to about 6.8/hr and 8.0/hr. Your P4 is producing more overall. (unless I'm totally missing something here) ;)

[Jeff]

you cant compare an a64 to a dual xeon rig :P

That's the thing... I can for what I'm trying to say. ;) I wouldn't care if I was measuring a Cyrix chip even. :lol:

I'm just trying to point out that bang-for-electrical-buck goes to the dually. I can measure my wife's XP that's running 2.41GHz to see what that draws but it's production is less than the A64(and single Xeon even). I think the last time I farted around with measuring XP's draw they were close to the A64s... which surprised me.

Hell... you've got me curious so I'll have to go do that now... :lol:

[Jupiler]

You mean 41 candidates/6hr update right? ;) That's about what I'm getting too.

And 226/33hrs and 175/22hrs work out to about 6.8/hr and 8.0/hr. Your P4 is producing more overall. (unless I'm totally missing something here) ;)

You're right.
Didn't even took the time to calculate how much my P4 really produces / 6 hours.
Back to school I go. :D

[Jeff]

Ok, on the wife's rig now and it's an AMD XP drawing 217w running at 2.41GHz. ;)

These are all with 9200 video cards and all with one hard drive, except this XP has a CD and DVD drive.

Production wise, this one comes in ~30-35 candidates/6hr update.

[saaya]

That's the thing... I can for what I'm trying to say. ;) I wouldn't care if I was measuring a Cyrix chip even. :lol:

I'm just trying to point out that bang-for-electrical-buck goes to the dually. I can measure my wife's XP that's running 2.41GHz to see what that draws but it's production is less than the A64(and single Xeon even). I think the last time I farted around with measuring XP's draw they were close to the A64s... which surprised me.

Hell... you've got me curious so I'll have to go do that now... :lol:

you cant make a general comment about duallies consuming that much less energy than single rigs when you compare two different types of cpus.

all you are proving atm is that a dual xeon rig is consuming less energy/bang than an a64 and an athlonxp rig :P

id like to see xeon single compared to xeon dual or athlonxp single to athlonmp or a64 single compared to opteron :P

i could as well meassure a nocona dual rig and then an athloxp rig and say dual rigs are not worth it, they consume more than 2x what a single rig needs :D

[bachus_anonym]

i'll just add that my farm of 4 xp's running as in my sig burn 930W/hour and have had output of ~152 cands/6hrs. all PCs come with two sticks, GF4 Ti4200 (one has R7000), HDD and 8W 120mm fan...
seems like my 2.6Ghz/247FSB Infinity is pulling ~43 cands/6hrs. if that helps anyone ;) no dualie found here...

[Jeff]

you cant make a general comment about duallies consuming that much less energy than single rigs when you compare two different types of cpus.

I wish someone with a dual AMD rig would post. ;) I just can't be bothered ripping apart right now. :(

Hold on... let me go ask someone on a different forum about his dual XP/MP rig...

[Rodzilla]

Damn... I take a nap and the thread blew up!!!!!! I don't have a power meter... so I can't play :( All I can say is that my farm almost doubled my bill... It would rock to be able to get that down a little...

Winter is coming!!! :D so I won't need to run the heater as much! :lol: it's 44*F outside atm and windy as all get out! The room with my pcs in it, is a comfy 65*F... And gas is WAY more expensive to heat the house here. Especially this year with the insane fuel cost! (I paid $2.20 for a gallon of gas last fill up)

[Jeff]

.:.D2OL Docking Farm.:. Specs & Real-time status updated every 10 minutes (http://abitnf7skicksass.netfirms.com/webtemp/DockingFarm.htm)

Little off topic... I like your D2OL Status Page. :up:

[Rodzilla]

Little off topic... I like your D2OL Status Page. :up:

Me too!!! I like your's too Jeff!!!!!!!

How did you do it?

[Jeff]

WebTemp is a great program. It just uploads the stats to my Earthlink space and then a webpage on my server displays the graphics. Simple. But after seeing bachs... I may change mine a little. ;)

(BTW, I already said I like yours in a different thread Rod.) :lol: ;)

[bachus_anonym]

Little off topic... I like your D2OL Status Page. :up:
Me too!!! I like your's too Jeff!!!!!!! How did you do it?

thanks ... i was checking out your status page, Jeff, to see if u had your dual xeons up-and-running... and i really liked it :thumbsup: so couldn't resist to make something like that to monitor my farm...
u need to register for $13 to be able to upload full stats graphs, though... so i did :)

i was also thinking about doing something like Rodzilla, to monitor my nodes.... i'll have a look at it :)

[Jeff]

:offtopic:
$13 is a bargain for how much I've used WebTemp. I registered a year, maybe two, ago and I have gotten every update since. The author is a very nice guy and has emailed me my password a couple times. I love supporting smaller programs like this since you know where your money goes. ;)

[saaya]

13$ is a very reasonable price for that program!!! most people go too far and ask for 20$ or 25$ wich most people are not willing to pay for a tool.

i wanted to buy cpucool when i had my P3 board and used it to oc and monitor the temps and all, but 25$ was just too much imo, so i kept uninstalling and installing the demo every month :D

is anybpdy registered on 2cpu.com? they should have the answers to our dually questions!

[RocKer]

you can find FSB400 capable boards for 30€ here in germany, and for 40€+ even nf2 FSB400 boards! so a sempron+nf2 for 80€ :slobber: thats def a very very sweat deal!

when it comes to folding boxes dualies are worth it i think, you only need one hdd and one psu and only one or two sticks of memory :)
Those prices are looking very nice for a xp-board,what kinda boards are the,can you give me the brand off those board.

New is allways better then secondhand,isn'it.

I wanna give my 2 cpu's(xp1800+ good oc'r btw & 750duron)a cheap board and get them to fold,a have almost everything else for it(keyb+mouse+graka,etc)so i ask you what kinda board will do just fine for this,as cheap as you can offcours:).

:off:
Am almost at 1000 candidates :banana: .