Seti at home takes a lot of power

Are you sure $2,50 /kwh? this is even 6x more expensive than here, i spend more than US$ 650 per month just to keep my hosts working at (US$ 0.40/kwhr). So i imagine at 2,50... :(

I've done something quite similar with my single cruncher. It's an IBM Intellistation Z-Pro 9228 with two each quad-core Xeon X5356 processors and an overclocked MSI Radeon R6870 Twin Frozr graphics card, all water-cooled with a Koolance Exos v2.0 external system. Running SETI on all 8 cores and the Radeon throws a goodly amount of heat into the office/spare bedroom.

I don't know how much time you let your machine crunch but I've come up with a rough way of rating computers that crunch by multiplying the Floating Point Speed by the Integer Speed / 10,000. I suppose I need to weight it with % of crunch time. Below are mine at 80% with your's at the bottom. But you certainly have a good build there. Surprise. the Dual Core 215 x2 beats the FX4100, but to be fair the FX4100 hasn't been using the GPU - No ATI tasks are getting downloaded. (And the CoreI5 Mac beats out the I7920). I do not claim that this is accurate, just a way I was looking at them.
BOINC
Computer Rank FP Speed-Int Speed
Athlon 64 3800+ 744 1833 4060
Amd Fx4100 897 1536 5838
Athlon 215 x2 1,513 2183 6931
I7 920 2,103 2540 8278
Mac Core I5 2,957 3315 8920
I7 3820 4,450 3519 12647
Your Xeon Machi 2,516 2838 8865

That didn't copy very well. Guess I need to learn how to paste an image on here.


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The 3 AMD boxes arent producing very much. Turn them off and sell them!
You could, with the proceeds, replace your GTX 260 with a GTX 680.

Lean and mean:
Intel i7 3820 + (2) GTX 550ti
Intel i7 920 + (1) GTX 680
Intel i5 2500 + (1) Radeon 6770

This would cut nearly half your power bill AND be contributing more work.

If your i7 920 has room on the motherboard, you could also sell your i5 machine and buy another GTX 680.

Even leaner and meaner:
Intel i7 3820 + (2) GTX 680
Intel i7 920 + (2) GTX 550ti


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I guess my questions would be:

1) Is there some cost of power that's acceptable and how much would that be, roughly? $10/month? $25/month?

2) Is there some amount of work you would feel good about contributing to SETI (a number, not something vague like "as much as I can"). 10,000 "RAC" or 20,000? More? Less?

3) Do you have any budget to spend on hardware to get the most out of whatever you feel okay spending on your power budget?

The best news is this: No matter what you decide, your contribution is important to the goal. When I started doing this, I ran the screen saver and turned the computer off at the end of the work day, turning it back on the next day. By doing that on several computers at once I was able to generate more than one day's worth of work every day.

Recent Average Credit and "total credits" are worthless. All that counts is that someone's computer, somewhere, part-time, full-time, big crunching hog or part-time crunching genius, finds something.

As you already know, several of your machines aren't very efficient by today's standards, but if it's what you have, then it is what you have. I'm an AMD CPU fan, myself, but they make lousy crunchers (in general and on a per-watt basis specifically). If you are worried about power efficiency, shut them down.

Let's say your real RAC is 30,000, all machines running.

You could get that out of a single $400 GTX 670. (about 170w under "bitmining" conditions according to TomsHardware)

The cost of running it (reference card with optimized apps = very roughly 30,000/day RAC) would be something like...

170w * 24h = 4080w /day
4080 / 1,000 = 4.08KwH / day
4.08 x $0.12/KwH = $0.49/day
$0.49/day x 365 = $178.85
$178.85 / 12 = $14.91 / month

Since the card's not the only thing in a computer, you can probably double that.

Then you could turn the others off, save $50+/month on power, and increase your "RAC" to 30,000 (or so) at the same time.

Just a thought and "in the ballpark" numbers.

There were several good posts there relating to getting the right hardware to crunch effectively. I can do some of that. Three of the AMD boxes would make could internet only machines for relatives that will never do more than Yahoo and Gmail. I could then take the funds and upgrade GPUs to crunch sans the CPUs and (Turn Off the Monitors!)Sounds like a good project. Also some answers to tbret.
1) Is there some cost of power that's acceptable and how much would that be, roughly? $10/month? $25/month? - I was thinking more like 15 a month. at nearly 100 a month (1200 year) that seemed a little steep.

2) Is there some amount of work you would feel good about contributing to SETI (a number, not something vague like "as much as I can"). 10,000 "RAC" or 20,000? More? Less? - I think I got a little caught up with wanting to deliver the most numbers I could with the equipment I had. Bottom line - better GPUs make better more efficient crunchers.

3) Do you have any budget to spend on hardware to get the most out of whatever you feel okay spending on your power budget? - Over time I can spend more on hardware and feel good about it. I guess I just like to utilize those old AMDs where it makes sense...like the x2 215 with 8 gb DDR2 ram, it works good for a server and the old AMD 3800+ on it's last legs is one to get rid of but it's still works for internet.

I hope that on the machines you are shutting down, you are letting them finish the work they already have on board.
____________
David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Yes, they are finishing

Oh my I wondered why Australia's electricity's is so expensive at $0.456 p/kw. But then I am using 3 laptops for BOINC and don't have any desktops. :)