New Computer System.. Advice on hardware purcahses?

[shotgunner101]

Hello guys long time no see after a short depression from all things distributed computing related I have decided to set up a computer system that will be able to compute HUGE ammounts of WU's in a short period of time. My budget is around 1800-2000$ dollars maximum I would prefer being lower than 2000$. Anyways without further ado this is my current hardware choices please give me advice or cristicsm on my choices I need the best bang for my buck.

Hey guys I wanted to point out I just found out that ATI has almost 3x times performance on GPU related computing vs nvidia. So I am considering going with a 2/3 way crossfire system. Do you guys think Opencl is a good option for Freerainbowtables.com to use for their distributed software?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106334 <- Dvd/CD drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811103033 <- Computer Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130236 <- MotherBoard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127552 <- 3x Video cards
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16826146016 <- Mouse
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145222 <- Ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103913 <- Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103065 <- CPU Cooler

[Dirk Broer]

Hi Shotgunner,

I'd double or even quadrupple the RAM if I were you. It it just 1 Gb per core, which might not be enough in case of e.g. Malaria@home. I have 4Gb on a Quad and running 4 Malaria WUs as good as freezes my system.
I'd also exchange the video cards for two HD 5970s, which will give you 9280 Gflop single precision and 1856 Gflop double precision as compared to 4216 Gflop single precision and 527 Gflop double precision for the trio of GTX 570s. The only advantage for the nVidia cards is that at the moment more projects support CUDA than they do AMD Stream/OpenCL.
If you want real CUDA performance and have unlimitd budget you might want a Tesla 2050 or 2070 card, or a Quadro 5000 or 6000, but they alone are above the budget for your entire system and frankly I'd say you'd be better of with a triple sli-570 or 580 arrangement. A single $3500 Quadro 6000 will deliver 1030 Gflop single precision and 515 Gflop double precision, and a triple sli would give astronomical computing power at the cost of heaps of money, firstly for procurement and later for your power bill. Two HD 5970s are more powerful and cheaper, incredible as this may sound.

As the OpenCL applications are "easily" ported to other architecture we will soon see a battle between the high-end nVidia and AMD cards as to which company really delivers in terms of performance. In the meantime I wait for the yet-to-come HD 6990 as the new king of performance.

[shotgunner101]

Hey thanks for the response man I will follow your advise but im curious why does the 5970 beat the 6970? Oh and how do you calculate flops for video cards I want to be able to do that .

[liuqyn]

the 5970 is a double GPU card where as the 6970 (which is the update for the 5870) is a single, the upcoming 6990 will be a double card as well.

[Jason1478963]

Welcome back and good luck with the build. I don't believe you can take advantage of triple channel memory in an am3 system yet. I have that motherboard and a 1090T with 4gb of ram working on WCG currently. I also have 1090T processor in my older MSI K9A2 Platinum board. I have all my CPU's water cooled currently. I believe vaughan may be able to give an opinion on the corsair H50 cooling setup on an x6. There is going to be a large amount of heat in that case with GPU and CPU crunching. The H50 may allow you to get some of that hot air out of the case at a rear fan to help keep case temps down. I would also make sure you get a good power supply with this kind of crunching power in one case. Active power factor correction and 80 plus efficient is a must in my main crunchers. I'm guessing a 600 watt or larger depending on the GPU configuration. With 5 PCI-e slots on this board I would consider an 800 or 1000 watt power supply. I have had good luck with Enermax and my corsair seems OK so far I think the only way to use all 5 slots is with a few single slot video cards. It looks like this case would have very decent air flow. I'm not sure how many high power GPU you could stack without going water cooled on a few video cards. Best of luck with the rest of the picks

[Dirk Broer]

As the motherboard in question (MSI NF980-G65) supports up to 16 Gb of RAM with dual channel support my suggestion is to fill it with 4 modules of 4 Gb each for maximum performance.
As to the Gflops for the GPUs: you can look them up at AMD/Ati or nVidia, or use Wikipedia. You might also want to look into the fora of the various projects where Ati and nVidia fanboys argue against each other, quoting the actual time needed to crunch a WU with their cards, which to me is a more serious benchmark than the Gflop score. In your case look out for the times quoted using a 6-core AMD CPU to backup the GPU, and look at your favourite project(s)
Freerainbowtables should definitely benefit from GPU crunching: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~zonena/papers/cracker.pdf

[shotgunner101]

Thanks for the recomendations guys this should assist me in choosing my final hardware with your alls advice .

[NeoGen]

Great to see you again shotgunner 101!!

Man, I wish I had $2000 to spend on a new rig right now!
Unfortunately christmas gifts and a low salary made a hole in my budget which has to be filled up again before being able to get into purchases of new equipment.
All in all, it's not so bad I guess... hopefully the prices of components will drop somewhat while I'm saving for them.

[shotgunner101]

Well heres what i finally decided on for my hardware. I really wanted the ATI 6970's but I couldn't manage to find a crossfire supported card that supported 3 video cards all of them wanted only 2 video card slots. Without further ado my final hardware choices.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129043 <-- Antec Computer Case 5x 120mm fans - 1x 200mm fan - 1x optional 120mm fan
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130236 <-- MotherBoard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127552 <-- VideoCards 3x MSI nvidia 570's
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103913 <-- Processor Amd Phenom 2 x6 1100T 3.3GHZ
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16823107128 <-- Keyboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16826146016 <-- Mouse
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106334 <-- Dvd/CD drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835705004 <-- 120mm Case fan 2700 RPM - 114.7cfm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231311 <-- Memory 8gb G.Skill RIpjaws

I shouldn't have heat issues right? I dont have any liquid cooling or any extra cooler selected for my cpu or gpu's so do you guys think my computer will be fine heat wise crunching? I mean after all 7x 120mm fans and a 200mm fan seems like I should have a 20C degree drop as others have reported but I dought they had a 3x sli card setup lol. I also dought they planned to overclock said setup :P.

P.S. I will be regreting these purchases 10 years from now most likely but for right now who cares I have been LONG overdue for a computer upgrade and this seems as good of time as any for one.

[Jason1478963]

uggg.... expired token again..... blah....blah.....blah.... I was mistaken on the motherboard that isn't the same one I have as mine is and AMD chipset. I have had good luck with my MSI stuff so far. I think the case airflow will be good and it looks like the gpu will push its hot air out the back of the case as well. The stock AMD heat sink may be Ok for that setup. I was curious to see what Power supply you picked as I believe this will be a very important piece. With this kind of power consumption the active power factor correction and higher efficiency will be important. I'm not sure on the wattage required per video card when crunching, but I would guess its going to take a 750 or 800watt power supply. I ran 2 4850s and a 9950 on a 500 watt power supply and switched it to a 1000 watt and saw a slight decrease in consumption with a Killawatt meter(newegg has these for 20 bucks at times). Best of luck on the build and please let us know when your up and crunching