got a new rig!

[NeoGen]

It is with great sadness that I announce that my trusty old Athlon XP 2000+ has passed away yesterday... autopsy revealed that it died of natural causes (motherboard failure) due to advanced age. :-(

But now for the good news, for its place I acquired parts and built a brand new AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition (+ mobo, + ram, etc...) and so, a new member to the family has arrived. :)

Forgive me though, for I have sinned, and also bought a Nvidia gfx card (instead of ATI), the cuda temptation was just too much and I wanted to give it a try. I had to control the budget so I went for a Geforce 9600 GT, which should be good enough to learn and play with cuda at least. :)

So, the final specs are:
Mobo: Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P
AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition
4GB DDR3 1333MHZ
XFX Geforce 9600 GT w/ 512Mb

I haven't even quite finished setting it up yet, but I couldn't resist giving it a spin, so I just slapped WinXP real quick on it to see and it's working great at first glance.
I will try some stability stress tests and OC'ing during the next few days. I don't even have boinc or anything else installed yet. :p

[Nflight]

Oh Boy, Do I ever want to upgrade now. I can feel the sensation when I eat a Peppermint Patty and that tingly sensation is sending my thoughts into last place in crunching ever farther. Damn I need to upgrade, soon my good friends soon! :blob3:

[vaughan]

Nice machine you've built there NeoGen. You'll need to put it through its paces in readiness for the next race.

I too recall the sad day my Athlon 2000+ passed away. It also had a mobo failure; the power supply did something to the plug on the mobo and the PC went down. At autopsy the connection was burnt and beyond salvage.

[PcManiac]

Good Motherboard! :)
sounds like more competition for future races :D

if I do any upgrades on my personal computer in the near future, I'll probably get the 940.. about the fastest AM2+ that will utilize all my motherboard features... I could run up to a 955, but it would have to "dumb down" for my board :/

[NeoGen]

Once I set everything up I also have to dig through those tutorials online on how to unlock the possible 4th core. :)

[gamer007]

Looks great NeoGen. I could use an upgrade right about now. :icon_razz:

[Brucifer]

Congrats on the new system!! :icon_mrgreen:

[plonk420]

is it stable? i think the 3rd core on my 710 is bad. i can crunch forever on 2 cores, but it always BSODs on 3 even with temps lower than running on 2 cores with the previous AMD HSFs (9550 and 710's) after getting a zalman 8700... (56C on 2 cores; 52C on 3 cores with the new zalman fan). not sure how to deal with the processing loss. might have to get a phenom ii based X2 when they come down a bit. i DO have a year or two left to do the retail warranty exchange...

[Keith75]

When I upgraded to my current i7-920 setup I really wanted to get an ATI card but CUDA just couldn't be overlooked.

[PcManiac]

Once I set everything up I also have to dig through those tutorials online on how to unlock the possible 4th core. :)

how much was the 710? I think you should have gone with the 550. that is super stable with 4 cores, and was only $99 for a AM3 cpu!!

I would suggest getting the latest bios update from Gigabyte :)

I unlocked the 550 using the same mobo with the "F4" version. (5/21/2009)

hope that helps! :icon_mrgreen:

edit: remember that you need to enable the hybrid setting in the BOIS to unlock.

[NeoGen]

I wanted to start testing the gpu so I dived head in GPUGrid... but I had no idea the WUs were so long... I only have two and the first one seems to take 30+ hours.

Next time I have to investigate first how long the WUs are :)

[NeoGen]

I have been tinkering with the gpu clocks and have found a nice stable OC'ed setting.
I did trash a bundle of GPUGrid workunits in the process, but now it is running stable at full cpu & gpu load :)

Core Clock: 600MHz -> 740MHz
Shaders Clock: 1500MHz -> 1850 MHz
Memory Clock: 700MHz -> 885 MHz

This was the max I could push it at stock cooling, any more than this and boinc would give out computation errors on GPUGrid. Surprisingly the temp increase wasn't that much :)

GPU Temp on full load: 65 C -> 68 C


EDIT:
Just noticed that upon boinc initialization, it scans the gpu and says the GFlops estimated value...
26 GFlops (stock) -> 32 GFlops (OC'ed) :)