New team member saying hello

[Area 51]

Hello!1!!!

I'm a fairly long-term SETI cruncher, although I have done PG on and off on various machines for a few months. Decided to side-line SETI for a while, at least until their new servers are bedded in - but I may just make PG my main project.

Crunching with a 955be (stock speed due to cooling concerns) and 3xGTX285's (fairly heavily over-clocked, 2 liquid cooled, 1 air cooled). Should be dropping a 1090 into my machine sometime over the coming days/hours (depending on when the courier can fight his/her way to my door).

[AMDave]

Hi there Area_51.
It is an excellent pleasure to be able to welcome a contributing member to the forum.
Welcome to AMD Users!

I saw your stats bopping in and out of PG there for a while and the next time you appeared, today, you had blown way past me.
It looks like you have a great handle on those GTX's.

Indeed, PrimeGrid's PPS Sieve is turning out to be a going concern for the GPU.
I just checked again and the work queue has been greatly topped up, so there is plenty there to get us all higher in the ranks and also make a big difference to multiple math sub-projects.

I share your cooling concerns, having 4 GPUs now myself and no HVAC and living in an almost equatorial climate.
(I wonder how Dr Iggy is getting along, I should check his local weather reports tomorrow. I don't know how he manages it really)

You really need to clear the road and lay down the red carpet (with rose petals of course) for couriers bearing X6 CPUs. heh heh.
While you grab a double-headed axe, I'll go fetch my courier-edition steel-spiked-mace.
We can have that sorted out in no time flat. ;)

What liquid cooling gear are you using?

[Area 51]

My cooling is in a constant state of flux - well, more a constant state of planning!!!

Basically, I'm headed for 4 GPUs, but I wanted to cool each GPU on its on loop so I had massive redundancy and I would be able to upgrade the GPUs in the future without having to re-engineer the whole setup (hence only 2 GPUs on wc atm). Its slightly more expensive than using 1 or 2 loops conventional design would suggest, but it has distinct advantages.

For each loop, I use:

1 x Aqua Computer block
1 x 150mm phobya reseroir
1 x 240mm phobta radiator
1 x 240mm phobya rad' stand
4 x Fractral Designs 120mm fans (set up as push pull config)
4 x fan grilles
1 x phobya DC12 400 pump
1.5 m tubing
8 x plug 'n' cool eblows
PC Ice coolant
misc scews, nuts and bolts!!!!

This setup allows me to run a pump at just 30% to keep a GPU at about 45 degrees under full load. Overall, the setup is very quiet for its ouput. I think there's a little more headroom in the GPUs for further overclocking, as the temps are rock stable and the PG GPU app is a little better behaved than the SETI one. Each pair of loops uses an M cubed T Balancer controller to control pump load (not many fan controllers can do 2 x 20W)! The radiators and resevoirs live on the outside/top of the case, and the pumps occupy the 5.25 bay.

Right now, even if I could find the cash to setup a third loop, I have run out of real-estate on/in my case for the rad', pump and res', so the next stage will be a (much) bigger case! The current setup should comeout at close to 600k/day with the 1090 in place, and maybe a further 10% more after futher GPU oc'ing!

Can't say enough good things about plug 'n' cool fittings, just cut the tube push it into the fitting and you're done - brilliant bit of engineering!!!!

My cooling concerns tend to surround my houses' inability to loose heat since it has a lot of insulation. I'm finishing off a new study atm, which is bigger and beter positioned in the house for running this rig 24x7, so hopefully I will be in a position to expand its processing capacity fairly soon.

[Dirk Broer]

Hello Area51!
I've seen you in the lists before, wondered were you were.

It sure was not the cooler of my latest GPU cruncher that was the problem -a nice heatpipe system on a Sapphire HD3850 AGP- but it drew too much power at a moment, so tomorrow I'm off to buy a new PSU, a 500W one with the meant 8-pins PCIE connector for the blasted GPU. You CAN just use the 6-pin PCIE connector, but apparantly not with a 350W FSP PSU...
The new PSU has more advantages, such as SATA connectors and the possibility to run even better GPUs from it in the future. At the moment my CPU is almost finihed with the 1058 (estimated) hour job on a seventeen-or-bust WU, which was finished in little over 210 hours actual time.

[Jason1478963]

4 gpu's I think you may need a heat exchanger and a hot tub for the heat you will be making. I wonder how long before people are using evaporative cooling towers to cool their crunchers at home. It is nice to have the heat in winter time, but when you need to run the a/c to keep the room cool it feels like your wasting electricity that could be running a few more crunchers. Best of luck on the GPU crunching

[Area 51]

4 gpu's I think you may need a heat exchanger and a hot tub for the heat you will be making. I wonder how long before people are using evaporative cooling towers to cool their crunchers at home. It is nice to have the heat in winter time, but when you need to run the a/c to keep the room cool it feels like your wasting electricity that could be running a few more crunchers. Best of luck on the GPU crunching

One of the reasons I run 285s atm; they are quite well behaved in terms of their heat output. When the rig finally gets moved to its new home, it will be the heating for that room, as there is currently no heating in there. In the summer, I can always back off the overclocks, and if necessary shut down 1 or 2 GPUs, but living in Scotland - this is unlikely to be a big problem!! It will be a long time before the 4th GPU comes on-line since a case upgrade needs to happen first, followed by a third loop for my existing third GPU and then a PSU upgrade!

if it ever got to the stage where I couldn't manage the heat output, I would back off; there is no way I mad enough to start looking at a/c purely for this! I also have limited myself to run only one dedicated cruncher - I can't afford to run any more - so it makes sense (to me) to 'tool it up' as much as I can.

[Area 51]

Woohoo:

The parcel has been loaded on to the drivers van
4 Dec 2010
09:12

A day late, but hopefully my 1090 will turn up today! Just waiting for the bit that says "the driver has got in his cab" on the tracking site now!!!

[Jason1478963]

best of luck with the 1090... It seems to be a great CPU for me.... I wish I had a couple more and a budget to run them all. WOW.... 3 loops in one computer? I currently have 4 computers on one loop with an old water heater(storage tank) via a heat exchanger. It doesn't seem to require high flow rates to keep this stuff cool. I think fitting enough radiators on your case is going to be the hard part. Best of luck on the upgrades and welcome to the team.

[Area 51]

best of luck with the 1090... It seems to be a great CPU for me.... I wish I had a couple more and a budget to run them all. WOW.... 3 loops in one computer? I currently have 4 computers on one loop with an old water heater(storage tank) via a heat exchanger. It doesn't seem to require high flow rates to keep this stuff cool. I think fitting enough radiators on your case is going to be the hard part. Best of luck on the upgrades and welcome to the team.

Love the 1090; 50% more cores with no extra heat!!!! There's about 1.5 degrees extra on the Northbridge, but I can live with that. Big salute to AMD for the design of the 1090; very impressive.

Multiple loops aren't so odd. A lot of people put in two pumps (and sometimes two rads) for setups that have multiple colling surfaces to deal with, I kind of just went that little further !!!!! :-).

[Jason1478963]

Love the 1090; 50% more cores with no extra heat!!!! There's about 1.5 degrees extra on the Northbridge, but I can live with that. Big salute to AMD for the design of the 1090; very impressive.

Multiple loops aren't so odd. A lot of people put in two pumps (and sometimes two rads) for setups that have multiple colling surfaces to deal with, I kind of just went that little further !!!!! :-).

I can see the reason for the multiple loops as it can be tricky to balance the flow on 4 parallel loops. It sounds like you have the radiator aspect covered. If you find you need more and price is getting high a heater core from a car can do a very nice job as well. My father was able to find a copper heater core from a car that works well for him. I started with a koolance setup and have found their stuff to be getting to expensive for my hobby. The GPU water blocks especially as they are out dated with the next generation of cards. I would be interested in seeing some pictures of your setup when you get it done