PCIe speeds are not very important for Seti@home due to the high level of refinement of the applications.

Projects like Einstein@home and GPUGrid are heavily dependent on PCIe speeds. Since they don't have people who can work with their applications to streamline and improve their efficency.

Relatively high DDR Ram speeds help as well in those projects.

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Well done on getting the system built for well under the initial quote, given the hardware costs involved that's a "good price".

Sharing the GPUs between the CPUs and making sure there is enough space for cooling air to get between the GPUs that way the work is split between them rather than one doing "the lot", while the other is fairly idle.

From your initial comments I guess you are going to run Linux of some sort or other, I would suggest getting the shop to do a cut down installation, but, for now keep the GUI but don't bother with things like whatever office package is normally loaded, or the games.
Installing BOINC is fairly straight forward if you use the version that comes in package manager, and that will very quickly tell you if all the processors are being detected by BOINC, thus available to run.

When you first start using the beast on SETI let it run a day or so on the "stock" applications, that way you will be able to check all the hardware is working and you aren't chasing a hardware problem thinking its a software configuration one.

Have fun - it will be great to watch this monster heading to the top of the leader board.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The latest Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distribution has a "minimal installation" option in the installation configuration. It drops the LibreOffice suite, games and all the fluff that the normal full featured installation installs. Just the bare minimum like a editor and browser and basic OS files. That is all that is needed to run the new CUDA90/1/2 special gpu application along with the latest Nvidia driver of course.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)