Hi

I need help want to build a 19 gpu setup .Dont want to spend 10k on cards.

I saw some cards that have pice slots and dont need any external power.

Will it be any good to use them .

Pros
Cheap
Low power

Cons
Low flops count

Thanks

What model are they?


Keep in mind, 19 low performance cards (under windows) will produce (at least) 4,700 RAC per hour.
2 RTX 2080Tis will produce (at least) 3,000 RAC per hour (under Linux with the special application the RACs will be higher, but the ratio will be similar).

With the Linux Special Application
19 low performance cards will use 1.5kW
2 RTX 2080Tis will use 500W

The money you save up front will soon be gone paying for power.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I failed to specifie I wanted to use something like nvidia gt series . Cards that dont need extra power they get there power over price port .

I saw that gt710 has like 19w power consuption.

So it is like 450w for the whole build .

Will a system like that be any good will it bring results .

I failed to specifie I wanted to use something like nvidia gt series . Cards that dont need extra power they get there power over price port .

I saw that gt710 has like 19w power consuption.

So it is like 450w for the whole build .

Will a system like that be any good will it bring results .

Take a look at the tables produced by Shaggie76 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=81962&postid=2018703#2018703 and make a judgement.

So it is like 450w for the whole build .

Will a system like that be any good will it bring results .

Yes, it will produce work, no it won't require a lot of power. But even though it doesn't use much power, it will have to use it for much, much, much, much, much longer than the GTX 750Tis i used for the 1.4kW comparison. In fact it will actually require more power to do less work. It is that slow.

A rather extreme theoretical example- A video card that uses 500W, but takes 5 seconds to produce a result is much more efficient than one that uses 5W but takes 5 days to produce a result.
It's not just now much power card requires, but how long it takes to produce a result. No point using a low powered card if it actually requires more power to complete a job.

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Grant
Darwin NT

The GT710 is off the bottom of Shaggie's chart, and will only run the CUDA applications not the faster OpenCL application, so it will be painfully slow, probably slower than the CPU (for a single task).
With 19 of them in a system you would be pushing the limits that a reasonably priced CPU can support - unlike coin mining the GPU does need some support doing the computation beyond just passing data between the storage and the GPU. While it wold be an interesting exercise to get a system working with 19 GT710 GPU's I very much doubt that it would be very productive one, and may indeed be highly unstable.

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

The current crop of mining hosts normally tap out at between 6 and 14 gpus. Nobody has been successful in getting 19 gpus running on the mining boards because of BIOS and cpu limitations.

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

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

The current crop of mining hosts normally tap out at between 6 and 14 gpus. Nobody has been successful in getting 19 gpus running on the mining boards because of BIOS and cpu limitations.

it can be done, but no one has used the right combination of hardware. i've mentioned it all before. but with some of the cheap mining motherboards, it's really not worth it due to the PCIe bottlenecks that you'll face. mainly in the DMI 3.0 (PCIe 3.0 x4) link between the chipset and the CPU. that's the biggest reason I havent really pursued that path.

Tbar could get 19 GPUs on his ASUS B250 Mining Expert motherboard, since it has 19 slots. but the kicker with that board, is that to get all 19 GPUs, you have to use some number of mining only cards. like the P102-100 or P106-100 cards that Tom and JStateson have. That board in particular was limited to 13 "normal" GPUs without the use of the mining cards. this was slightly adjusted to 14 GPUs via a BIOS update, so that's why Tbar hasn't gone past 14. If he bought some P106 or P102 mining cards, he could probably get more, but I think between the PCIe limits of the mining cards themselves (They are PCIe 1.0 x4 card with a x16 slot finger), coupled with the already bottlenecked DMI 3.0 link, it's just not worth it. The Special Sauce app needs a little more than half of a PCIe 3.0 x1 link on each GPU to run full speed. then theres the issue of CPU as you mentioned, since the best CPU you can put on that board is only 4c/8t. not enough in my opinion to run that many GPUs. it's best to have at least 1 thread per GPU, in my opinion.

Toms board might be able to get to 18 normal GPUs, but since mining isnt as popular as it used to be, I'm not sure there are many people with that same board to verify how many "normal" cards it can take before failing to boot, or if it needs mining cards also. since it's a newer gen board, at least he can put a 8c/16t chip in it, though he's still subject to the DMI 3.0 limit as well as some interesting PCIe switching that might severely limit the bandwidth to a handful of the slots.

In general, if you want to attempt something like this, RTFM in depth and familiarize yourself with the PCIe topology of the motherboards you are considering to see if they will really perform the way you hope. Don't just buy a board that has X number of slots and assume you can run all the cards at full speed.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Hi

I need help want to build a 19 gpu setup .Dont want to spend 10k on cards.

I saw some cards that have pice slots and dont need any external power.

Late generation Gtx 750Ti's don't always require external power. But if their price is nearly the same as a Gtx 1060 3Gb it would be a shame to handicap yourself that way. eBay is showing them way cheaper than the last time I looked.

I know that the Gtx 750 ti will run with lower version #s of Tbar's AIO (aka: Special Sauce) under Linux.

Some of us have had trouble mixing AMD video cards and Nvidia cards on the same system and trying to get Open Cl drivers to correctly install.

For bit-coin mining, at least, the recommendation has been a mix of Nvidia mining GPUs and AMD mining GPUs. You might be able to run a mixed card system and make it to 19 GPUs. I would not buy the most expensive AMD mining cards without external power until you confirm you can mix them under Linux. I don't believe you can manage it under Windows.

While you could go for a 19 gpu rig (which may or may not actually be able to run 19 non-mining cards) your system would still not allow you to run all the way at the very top of the Leaderboard.

But it would give you the most GPUs on a single motherboard for Seti@Home. You have to beat the 14 that Tbar is currently running for that particular Crown.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).