It Lives, It Lives !!

It was a dark and stormy night.....

Well actually it was a cold and miserable afternoon with nothing on the TV. While having a "cleanout" in the "Data Processing Centre" I found the box with all my retired GTS250's, a motherboard and a power supply. Having all the bits I decided to build the ultimate in my on-going experiments with PCI to PCIE adaptors and PCIE x1 to PCIE x16 adaptor cables.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS5 which has 7 expansion slots (2xPCIE 16, 3xPCIE 1 and 2x 33MHz PCI slots), fortuitously I had 7 spare GPU cards. As the rig is intended as a GPU only cruncher, for power consumption and heat reasons I decided to use an E7200 C2D processor. 4 GB of 1200MHz DDR2 RAM and an old XP Home installation on an 30GB IDE HDD completed the hardware.

It took about 3/4's of an hour to put the basic hardware together, another couple of hours to obtain a stable overclock to get the memory running at 1200MHz and load the appropriate software. I then started adding the additional GPU's, one at a time. It all went smoothly (almost too smoothly), as I added each card it was recognised and installed. The only problem was some dicey soldering on one of the PCIE extender cables.

"The Monster" as it is named (because it is put together from old body parts) has now been on line for 8 days and is performing very well. It has averaged around 63,000 cobblestones a day which equals 9k per card which is the ballpark figure for a GTS250 so the load on the system is not effecting crunching times much if at all

This is the completed beast



The 7th video card is located at the bottom left. Here is a close up



This is the completed beast in operation, some additional cooling was required :-)


The only teething problem was, due to the amount of memory allocated to the GPU's. The total amount available for the OS was barely a Gig. As a result I had to strip the OS back to the absolute basics and the box runs with no desktop and BOINC Manager shut down to conserve what's available.

The next plan is to install Linux on it and make it a REAL beast.


Slightly off topic. There was a discussion on the boards a few months back as to whether a top mounted or a bottom mounted power supply was preferable.
As shown below, I prefer top mounting :-)



T.A.

Wow. Now that's a crunching machine. :-)
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-Dave #2


3.2.0-33

Thank you very much for posting this.

I feel so much less like a geek and an inhuman nerd after seeing this.

May your Frankenstein Monster long embarrass my attempts at superciliousness.

If this doesn't earn you some type of title, there is something wrong with the Universe.

If we could figure-out why we do what we do, we'd probably be able to help a lot of heroine addicts.

Computers are always best when you build them yourself,
and you even moddead the case in true Frankenfurter style.
Who needs steampunk when you have your own demolition saw :¬)
That is the kind of quality botch job I would be proud to have built.

Nice pics of the monster should heat the home with that much power

It was a dark and stormy night.....

Where I came from we would start:

"It was a dark and gloomy night in Gotham City" :)
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Nice pics of the monster should heat the home with that much power

He is on the wrong part of the planet to need much in the way of home heating . . .

It won't look so cute once our Gov't brings in the rule outlawing brand names on fag packets. At least posterity will know your favourite ciggie!
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It won't look so cute once our Gov't brings in the rule outlawing brand names on fag packets. At least posterity will know your favourite ciggie!

Sorry, what kind of packages?

Be careful with American websites. Fag means something completely different here.

Stick that next to the bed this winter and turn off the furnace.
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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Yup, that's definitely Skynet Jr right there :)
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In an alternate universe, it was a ZX81 that asked for clothes, boots and motorcycle.

Beer/wine o'clock, the best of the o'clocks.

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall, along came a giant, and cooked him for breakfast.

Nice pics of the monster should heat the home with that much power

He is on the wrong part of the planet to need much in the way of home heating . . .

Though it is approaching winter there.