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Thread: External GPU's

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    External GPU's

    Has anyone here looked into using external gpu's for boinc crunching ?????

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    Not yet, I'm more into internal GPUs. Love to see my ARM cores using their GPU too...
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 06-13-2017 at 09:40 PM.


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    What a great idea, I didn't know there was such a thing, but have just been reading this about them - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/amd-wants-to-standardise-the-external-gpu/

    Will have to do a bit more research, this might be a way to give my older machines a bit more life perhaps.

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    From the bits and pieces I read about it, it seems this latest generation are mostly Thunderbolt 3 connected enclosures, but the problem is that they are pretty much vendor locked-in. There are a handful of manufacturers and each only guarantees compatibility with their own top-of-the-line xyz laptop. I have not heard about an open solution that could be used with any Thunderbolt 3 desktop/laptop. And they're pretty expensive for just being a custom sized case with a Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe converter, the manufacturers are taking a ton of profit for that niche gamers market.

    Bitcoin/Altcoin GPU miners have a much cheaper and effective solution like this:



    This one is an open case but I'm sure there's variations of this with closed case, I think I've seen plexiglass ones. And unlike the GPU enclosures that need a separate PSU for each enclosure, this will take all those GPUs with the same one PSU.

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    With a little more digging around on the subject I found that several of the custom cases out there that hold 6 or even 8 GPUs in a standard 4U server rack mountable case connect their GPUs using these adapters:



    It seems they're USB to PCIe 3.0 powered risers / adapters. This I believe will severely cut the bandwidth of the GPUs full x16 (128Gbps) to x1 (8Gbps) only, and on top of that it even takes another cut down to 5Gbps because that's the limit of USB 3.0. But I guess for GPU mining the need for data transfer back and forth is minimal compared to the need for computational capacity so the bandwidth is really not that necessary. In terms of Distributed Computing it might work too, but I think some projects might get a performance penalty due to the higher latency and lower bandwidth of USB 3.0.

    Who's got $500 to splurge (plus cost of GPUs, PSU, motherboard, RAM, CPU, etc) to test it out?
    Last edited by NeoGen; 06-13-2017 at 11:08 PM.

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    Well I was looking at it from the aspect of crunching large long term work units for primegrid. and I wouldn't think that the band width would be an issue in something like that as compared to the gamers that are driving tons of video through the system..... thoughts?? And also to help spread stuff out to help in the cooling issue too.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Brucifer View Post
    Well I was looking at it from the aspect of crunching large long term work units for primegrid. and I wouldn't think that the band width would be an issue in something like that as compared to the gamers that are driving tons of video through the system..... thoughts?? And also to help spread stuff out to help in the cooling issue too.
    I've thought about one of those GPU mining solutions but for crunching, but I don't have the funds for it yet.
    I do think for long workunits it would do perfectly, and most projects have medium to long workunits that don't require CPU feeding so it would be awesome. But if you get a big rig like the ones above remember it will produce a massive amount of heat. I have a small "home office" (man cave ) and just running one good GPU and a couple of desktops raises the temperature of this room considerably compared to the rest of the house, I can't imagine how I would run a monster 6-GPU cruncher.

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    It might both be cheaper and cooler to hire GPUs on the Amazon Cloud...


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    Their prices are confusing being broken down by regions, and then depending on the instance type and etc, but from a quick look up they still seem way too high... the lowest I could tell for a GPU powered unit was $0.9 per hour, which is crazy high since we want to run it 24/7.

    Now that I think of it... Bitcoin and similars have "cloud mining" which is you rent a big server to mine for you and (if the price is good) it will turn you a small profit. In the case of Distributed Computing the reward is in BOINC cobblestones and/or other kinds of points that have no monetary value, so I'm looking at $0.9/hour as crazy because I'm not getting that money back (and let's be honest... it's really way more than if I just buy my own GPU and pay for the electricity).
    Now if there was a similar cloud service that would cost about... $40/month for one good GPU instance for BOINC crunching? I would totally jump on it! In my view $480/year is not too far from the cost of the GPU (well, some are way more than that) plus electricity to run it.

    EDIT: You can tell by the numbers I put up that I don't buy the biggest baddest GPUs, right?
    Last edited by NeoGen; 06-14-2017 at 05:58 PM.

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    We have such a fascinating hobby...





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