A recent thread about an energy efficient crunching farm got me thinking. How much number cruncing could you get for little cash or power draw? My theory was a cheap quad core and all-in-one system board should be in the sweet spot.

So...



Gigabyte motherboard.



Plug in the bits.



Clip on a stock Cooler.



Bolt it into an old P4 box. It had had it's power supply replaced sometime in the recent past with a 430W supply with a 24+4 connector. But any reasonably grunty 300w+ P4 supply should be OK with some adaptors.



Connect up the various wires. Just using the old IDE drive and CDROM. Thats the Cheap part.



It Posts !!!



A bit of intalling XP, Drivers, SSP3 & Boinc and we are crunching.



Note the Watt meter in the foreground. 78 watts power draw with all 4 cores at 100%. It's running the standard Ap there so I could find how much the V8 SSSE3 speeds things up (about 100%)

Now this isn't a high power gaming rig, but as a daily driver for Internet, Multimedia, basic photo editing and a bit of 3D rendering it runs sweet.

Total parts cost (In US$ from Newegg.com)
CPU - $190
Mbd - $59
Ram - $25

Thats $274 to take the box's RAC from ~250 to 3,000+. Thats the Cheerfull part.

I can allways add a PCI-E GPU, DVD RW and a nice fast SATA disk, and have a usefull gaming rig, but that would negate the Cheap part of the project.

Anyway.. you dont have to spend megabucks to crunch, and even if funds weren't limited, you could rebuilt multiple boxes like this for the cost of a single high end machine and get more bang for the buck, and lower overall power useage.

New PC - Q6600 PC

Cheers

Ian

Ian---great work! Very nice!!!!

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Looks major interesting -- what size RAM package?

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One of these days I need to do that to my old Dell B110 case. Get a new motherboard and a quad processor plus a new HD as I don't have one available at the moment. It already has a DVD writer installed.

I just stripped it down and found that the thing only had a 250 watt PS in it.

Looking at some costs, for the board, memory, PS and hard drive it would cost me about $183 before shipping. I still have my old E2160 to use.

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Looks major interesting -- what size RAM package?

It's got one gig at the moment, cheap enough. Just sitting there crunching it's only using 350mb of it, so plenty to run other regular software. If you just wanted a crunching box then 512mb would do, and probably not take any noticable performance hit.

Ian

Looks major interesting -- what size RAM package?

It's got one gig at the moment, cheap enough. Just sitting there crunching it's only using 350mb of it, so plenty to run other regular software. If you just wanted a crunching box then 512mb would do, and probably not take any noticable performance hit.

Ian

RAM is super-cheap now anyway. I just bought a 2Gb module for my laptop for $24 CDN.

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Looks major interesting -- what size RAM package?

It's got one gig at the moment, cheap enough. Just sitting there crunching it's only using 350mb of it, so plenty to run other regular software. If you just wanted a crunching box then 512mb would do, and probably not take any noticable performance hit.

Ian

Ianab, very nicely done! I couldn't help to notice that you have only one stick of ram in it. If the board supports dual channel operation (and most recent boards do) and you have another stick of ram laying around (or 2 of 512 MB each) you might consider putting that in there as well. Quads love memory bandwidth, and you would get another 5-10% increase in performance just from running your memory in dual channel. Two times 512 is better than one times 1024 in this respect. Just a thought, good luck with your new rig!

Regards,
John.

Ianab, very nicely done! I couldn't help to notice that you have only one stick of ram in it. If the board supports dual channel operation (and most recent boards do) and you have another stick of ram laying around (or 2 of 512 MB each) you might consider putting that in there as well. Quads love memory bandwidth, and you would get another 5-10% increase in performance just from running your memory in dual channel. Two times 512 is better than one times 1024 in this respect. Just a thought, good luck with your new rig!

Regards,
John.

I do have 2 x 512 modules in another box that I will swap over. I'm just running it like that for a while to get some base performance numbers. Just interesting to know exactly how much boost the dual channel will give in this application.

Ian

Ianab, very nicely done! I couldn't help to notice that you have only one stick of ram in it. If the board supports dual channel operation (and most recent boards do) and you have another stick of ram laying around (or 2 of 512 MB each) you might consider putting that in there as well. Quads love memory bandwidth, and you would get another 5-10% increase in performance just from running your memory in dual channel. Two times 512 is better than one times 1024 in this respect. Just a thought, good luck with your new rig!

Regards,
John.

I do have 2 x 512 modules in another box that I will swap over. I'm just running it like that for a while to get some base performance numbers. Just interesting to know exactly how much boost the dual channel will give in this application.

Ian

It depends on how RAM bandwidth starved your CPU is at the current settings......although I cannot put a number on it, I saw a very large increase in performance when I upgraded the Frozen Penny from DDR2 to much faster DDR3 at the same CPU clock speed.......it just needed better access to RAM to make it much happier.

And when going to dual channel, both sticks of RAM should be matched, I am not sure what kind of results you would get if you put a mismatched set into the sockets.......

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Good One
I run two rigs with exactly the same combination. Their RAC's are 4251 & 4234 and still climbing. I don't know what the power drain is but they will run quite happily on a 400W power supply.

Because these are not a "Primo" board the over clocking performance varies from board to board. One combination of mine will run quite happily with a memory speed of 1220MHz the other falls over at 1100MHz, swapping DIMMS between computers made no difference.


A couple of tips if you plan to overclock this unit
1) The onboard LAN chip falls over at about 340MHz FSB and the onboard video falls over at 380MHz FSB. this is why I had to go to a PCI LAN card in both rigs.

2) It's possible to cook the Southbridge chip with too much O/C. This chip runs pretty hot normally and with O/C'ing can get too hot to touch. I solved this problem by mounting a small 30mm square fan on the heatsink to keep it cool.

This fan is what stops me from trying a PCI video card to try beyond beyond a 400MHz FSB. It's just a bit to high for the card to fit over it <DBB>

Will post some piccys when I work out how :-)


Brodo

Wow ,good job Ian!

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SETI

For a small speedup due to memory bandwidth:

If you are using on-board "integrated" graphics, then you can give the CPU more available memory bandwidth by reducing your screen resolution down to a minimum.

This used to be a big problem on old machines where the memory bandwidth was quite low to begin with. You could lose over 10% performance due to the CPU having to wait for the graphics chip to get off the RAM. Not such a big problem with today's faster RAM but still a small bit of performance.

A good question is whether the graphics system stays off the RAM completely when disabled or when in sleep mode. I would guess that is very motherboard chipset dependant... Anyone know for sure for the latest chipsets?


Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

If you would like to save some power, are feeling brave, and that motherboard allows CPU voltage control, you could try undervolting the Q6600.

People talk about overclocking all the time, and some laptop folks undervolt, but I've not heard many Q6600 owners considering it.

Even at 78 watts, for a system with the admirably low parts cost of yours, the lifetime power consumption is a really significant of the lifetime cost. The CPU controlled share of power consumption in your system is unusually high for a stock system because of the low power of the other components.

Leaving the clock rate at stock, I suspect you could dial down the CPU voltage by something like 0.2V and still find it to run your BOINC aps and any other sanity checks such as Prime95 you like. If so, I think you'd find that to be a rather substantial power savings. Of course, just as with overclocking, you would risk that some more challenging piece of code may turn up later, and require a little more. That is the same risk cheerfully accepted by the overclockers every day, so I'd think there would be a population of undervolters for whom it would be just as reasonable a risk.

If I remember correctly, when I worked up the curve of voltage vs. maximum frequency for my Q6600 running in my particular motherboard, the minimum voltage at 2.4 GHz (stock) was the same as at 1.8 GHz, and under 1.1V.

Not that I've followed my own advice--I run moderately overclocked and moderately overvolt.

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Ian---great work! Very nice!!!!

Good Job !

Did the same thing.

Be sure to go out and get the newest ECS bios for the motherboard. (Although I used a ECS GA-G33M motherboard, the BIOs that came on the orig didn't allow overclocking.) You should be able to add at least +20% crunching power by a simple BIOs update/change. (Still using the stock fan.)

Being a minimalist.. I just left the motherboard out on the granite table along with the disk and power supply, using a standalone on/off microswitch and a led to show disk activity. (I didn't use any case at all. And it seems to like the added airflow.)

But for the low power usage... Computer = Great. But for an eye opener, try putting that power display, on that computer monitor power cord....

Thanks, Jack Woolley

Well, I've got my parts ordered, so about 10 days from now I should be able to shut down my Dell P-IIIs. I can't complain, they have been good units, but it is time to move on ...

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Parts starting to arrive -- should be up and running about the 1st of the month

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Parts starting to arrive -- should be up and running about the 1st of the month

Oh, cool, another builder. I am collecting stuff for my first build.
I'll likely be a week or so behind yours. What are you building?

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein