Nearly there! Funding approved by she who must be obeyed...

My biggest concern has been mounting a CPU cooler but I found this video, a step-by-step guide to installing my chosen cooler. I noted the materials used and bought them yesterday. See the blue rows in the table. I think I got a great deal on the actual cooler; €28.87 with free shipping, from a French supermarket chain - here.



Somehow an SSD crept in there but, with tongue in cheek, I can claim the total is under €1000...

A niggle is that the mobo and case must come from Amazon traders. I'm thinking about ordering them first, followed by the Amazon order when I see the whites of their eyes.

Tom

@tomba:

Consider saving the cost of Windows and install Linux instead. Linux will give you 11% shorter run times compared to Win 7/8. If you intend to keep your current Windows rig you could use it for web surfing and non-crunching activity. I'll guide you through the installation, setup and configuration every step of the way and I'm sure other Linux users will help too. It's not nearly as difficult as many people think. Eventually you'll get rid of Windows completely and wonder why you didn't do it sooner. You might be able to get a nice UPS for what you would spend on Windows.

Thanks for that, Dagorath. I like the idea of shorter run times but, this being my first build, I think it unwise to implement a new opsys now. And I do have a "free" copy of Win7 available, i.e. paid for long ago and written off.

Perhaps you could point me at a rundown on the differences between your preferred Linux and Win7?

Lovely machine, Tomba.

The only changes I would make would be using Ubuntu and installing an FX-8350 CPU. Alas, funding authority has nixed the proposed new build for now. :(

The only changes I would make would be using Ubuntu and installing an FX-8350 CPU.

Linux is not on, yet... If I went for the FX-8350, what difference would I see for the extra €40?

Tom

Thanks for that, Dagorath. I like the idea of shorter run times but, this being my first build, I think it unwise to implement a new opsys now. And I do have a "free" copy of Win7 available, i.e. paid for long ago and written off.

Perhaps you could point me at a rundown on the differences between your preferred Linux and Win7?

Oh, well if you already have a Windows and that's the OS you know best than that is definitely the way to go to get it all working. You can experiment with Linux later when the time is right. And since you have a legal Windows disk you have a lot of nice options for implementing a dual opsys system. You can go dual-boot which allows booting either Linux or Windows. Or you can install Linux then install VirtualBox (free) on Linux and use your Win7 disk to create a virtual Win7 machine that runs on the host Linux opsys. That way you can have both opsys running simultaneously. You can also do the opposite and install VirtualBox on Win7 and create a virtual Linux machine running on the host Win7 opsys. This latter scenario as a very convenient way to explore Linux without having to boot back and forth between Win and Lin. People who have never experienced a virtual machine are usually surprised at how well they work and how robust they are. I use them frequently.

My favorite Linux is Ubuntu and one of the reasons (not necessarily the main reason) it is my favorite is because it's lead developer, Mark Shuttleworth, is wealthy and doesn't mind spending the money required for development. Probably the biggest reason it is my favorite is that Shuttleworth has abandoned many of the ideas that have prevented more people from adopting Linux. He has made Ubuntu very easy to use, easier than Windows IMHO, while retaining all of Linux's traditional stability and open source concept.

I could point you at various rundowns of the differences between Ubuntu and Windows but I think you would view those the same way I do. They hype either Linux or Windows and resort to niggling little details about both. For me there are only three important differences: Linux is free, more stable and more user friendly. All other differences grow out of those three top level differences, again IMHO. Others present differences that are correct but so irrelevant that in the end those differences are always overridden by which opsys you are most familiar with so what's the point of worrying about those.

I like Linux because it's free and there is nobody saying...

I agree Bob, your team's code would improve our opsys, good job. To keep revenues up we cannot offer that as a free update/upgrade so we'll hold it back for now and include it in the next version along with other things our loyal suckers... ooops! I mean loyal users... have been brainwashed to want, and we'll charge them ummm... errrr... hmmmm... call in the marketing people and lawyers and ask them what they think our loyal suckers... ooops! I mean loyal users... will be able to afford next time then add 25% to that. Huh? The new code hasn't been fully debugged and tested? What does that have to do with anything? If we hear any complaints about that we'll send McAfee, Norton and their crew on a free Mediterranean cruise and layout how they will tell the world all the trouble is due to... ummmm... hmmmmm.... who is most unpopular these days... Al Qaida? that nutbar in North Korea? those holier than thou Canucks? bahh it doesn't make any difference and yes I know it's Canadonians not Canucks, the point is we'll pull a name out of a hat and blame it all on the cyber-terrorists they sponsor. It works every time, even Jobs gets away with it and everybody knows what a poofter he is. Which reminds me... how is our campaign to associate turtlenecks with homosexuality and AIDS progressing? Are our loyal suckers... ooops! I mean loyal users... buying that nonsense yet or do we have to give away a truckload of cheap turtlenecks away at the upcoming Gay Pride parade and snap pictures of them with the turtlenecks on with Gay Pride banners clearly visible in the background and plant the pics right beside ads about AIDS?

You know all the above is true, extrapolate from there. You don't need my help with that.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Hi Tom,

You made the system even nicer.
However if you buy an SSD from 100 or 120 GB (which is enough for Win7 and a lot of programs) and use the hard disk for data, you safe about €80 and could by the faster AMD CPU or a 660Ti?
With the CPU cooler you get thermal past so you didn't need to order that extra.
I have several anti static wrist bands but don't use them. What I do however is to lay the MOBO on the anti static bag it is shipped in. And if you read the manual of the CPU cooler than you see which nuts you need to place in which hole for the AMD build and then you can place that more easily at the back of the MOBO than was shown in the film. You don't need to touch the MOBO so much in that case.
And for cleaning the heat pipes that tough the CPU and the CPU as well you can use iso-alcohol, also known as rubbing alcohol or isopropyl alcohol, you can buy a bit at a local chemist or pharmacy, way cheaper then the special stuff hardware stores are selling.

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Greetings from TJ

My friend installed an SSD in his computer. Now that the initial Wow! factor has worn off he says he wishes he had bought a UPS instead. The main benefit he sees is that the machine boots extremely fast but if the machine is a dedicated cruncher it doesn't shutdown and reboot often. He claims the SSD makes little difference to his normal computer activities like web surfing, listening to music, word processing, and CAD (he's a draftsman). Sure, those files load and save a little faster but there's not much practical difference between 1 second and 5 seconds. If you save 4 seconds 50 times a day that's 200 seconds or less than 4 minutes which is nothing I would worry about.

A UPS can save you hours of messing around with restores and redoing work that got destroyed by a power failure before it got saved or backed up.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

My friend installed an SSD in his computer. Now that the initial Wow! factor has worn off he says he wishes he had bought a UPS instead. The main benefit he sees is that the machine boots extremely fast but if the machine is a dedicated cruncher it doesn't shutdown and reboot often. He claims the SSD makes little difference to his normal computer activities like web surfing, listening to music, word processing, and CAD (he's a draftsman). Sure, those files load and save a little faster but there's not much practical difference between 1 second and 5 seconds. If you save 4 seconds 50 times a day that's 200 seconds or less than 4 minutes which is nothing I would worry about.

In my experience it is a very important factor that the user interface should immediately react to the user's actions something spectacular (not just changing the shape of the mouse pointer), or the user will click again and again and again. Having an SSD and a lot of RAM (so you can turn off the virtual memory) can enhance the user experience so much, that the wow factor could be permanent. In this area the mobile devices always had the benefit of having an SSD built in right from the start. (I had an old "tablet" PC with Win98 on a 2.5" HDD - it was a completely pointless device)

EDIT: I have a Core i7-980X (6 cores, 2 threads on each core) and I used to crunch on it for rosetta@home. Their workunits read and write so much at startup, that they keep on failing when the BOINC manager is trying to start 8-9-10 of them at once (with "no heartbeat from client" error). This error could be avoided by suspending all rosetta@home workunits before shutdown, and restarting them one by one after startup, or having an SSD drive.

A UPS can save you hours of messing around with restores and redoing work that got destroyed by a power failure before it got saved or backed up.

Sure it can. A UPS is highly recommended t for workstations and servers. But if you don't have one, you can turn off write caching on your drive(s) in device manager, and this will reduce the chance of data loss in a case of a power failure, and it won't degrade the performance of the SSD drive much. If you turn off virtual memory also, it will reduce the chance of data loss even more.

During the last week I tested Linux vs W7 and Linux was 12.5% faster on a GTX770 (Exact same system). XP is about as fast as Linux.

Having an SSD on my Windows system has been of great benefit to me over the last year or so. I hate waiting 10minutes for a system to restart, and installing drivers (especially NVidia) is so much faster; 3 or 4minutes compared to about 30min if you include the restarts. My Linux systems still use HDD's, but boot time isn't as high for dedicated crunching systems and I don't reboot too often.

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@TJ:

I agree with your recommendation of 660TI over 660. For just a little more money you get a big increase in performance.

Here I read that the 660TI is but 4% points better than the 660:



Given that Amazon France's 660 is €165 and the TI version is €255, for a 4% improvement I'll stick with the non-TI version (me thinks...). It's hardly a big performance increase and it's not a little more money.

Tom

That is a 4% delta when comparing cards against what was the top GPU for GPUGrid, the Titan (now overtaken by the GTX780Ti), and ((55/51)*100%)-100%=8%; the Reference 660Ti at Reference clocks is 8% faster than a reference 660.
Most GTX660Ti's typically boosts up to ~1200MHz and for here are around 20% fast than a reference 660, as suggested. However the theoretical performance difference between the GTX660 and 660Ti is 40%. The 660Ti is somewhat bandwidth constrained compared to the GTX660; both have the same bandwidth, but the 660 has less CUDA cores to feed.

Obviously I can't make a performance table that includes each and every manufactured version of every card, so I just went by reference models. A few people did chip in with their cards boost capabilities.

NVidia GPU Card comparisons in GFLOPS peak

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The 660Ti is somewhat bandwidth constrained compared to the GTX660; both have the same bandwidth, but the 660 has less CUDA cores to feed.

I believe you're refering to GPU memory bandwidth correct? And I believe that restriction either decreases or disappears on GTX 670, yes?

Regarding comments extolling SSD... don't take this as mindless Windows bashing or a Linux plug but I had no idea it takes 30 minutes and several reboots to install or upgrade an NVIDIA driver on Windows. On Linux an NVIDIA driver installs in about 7 minutes for me. The way I do it requires a reboot but that's only because that's the only way I can find to shutdown and restart X. If the preferred method worked for me I wouldn't have to reboot at all and install and updates would require about 5 minutes. OK, that's a compelling reason for a Windows user to have an SSD.

So I'll expand on that a little because tomba asked for a list of differences between Lin and Win. I'm not sure of the technical reason but driver installation in general, not just NVIDIA driver, as well as opsys updates are generally much faster and easier on Lin compared to Win. Anybody who has used both opsys' can verify that. Devoted Win proponents counter with the argument that Win has drivers for more devices than Lin and that is true but not nearly as true as it was 10 years ago. As more and more device manufacturers have come to realize that complying with open standards has a positive influence on their revenue, Linux devs have followed up with drivers for those devices and frequently you bring home a new camera, printer or whatever and just connect it to the USB port and 10 seconds later it's working, no need to put a disc in the DVD drive or download something or even reboot. Now that is the way Bill Gates intended Plug 'n Play to work, I think. And that's one of the reasons why I feel my claim that Linux is more user friendly is not just fanboy talk, it's real.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

I like to read all these Linux things as I still have issues with my Linux or even better Linux and I.
But it would be better to make a new thread for that as this is more about building a new PC.

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Greetings from TJ

If we had a nice Linux forum area, all things Linux could be shifted to there... Alas we don't so all things Linux are strewn across all threads in all forums...

I now find setting Linux up faster than setting Windows up.
My only gripe is the lack of tools/apps to control fan speed (especially on multi-GPU setups), but it can be done and there are plenty of work-rounds.
I find that Linux sees some devices that Windows struggles with, especially LAN cards and the likes. The chip-set drivers are just there, whereas when setting up Windows its often a case of restarting about 7 times.

I expect I will eventually move to Linux for every system and just run W7 in a VM; that way I can crunch without the 12.5% performance hit, and it's also much easier to backup and restore VM images.

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Again, thanks everyone for your input.

I listened. The SSD is gone and the FX8350 is in. Also in are a hard disk (500GB is more than enough) and a DVD/CD RW (Blueray is of no interest to me).

The items in blue are on order.



That leaves the question of GTX 660 vs. 660TI. Price difference is €116. But what's the performance difference in the real, GPUGrid, world?

I keep a log of WUs. This past month I've done 27 NATHAN_KIDKIXc22 WUs. The CPU run times are remarkably consistent, averaging 43298 seconds; 12.027 hours. That's on my 2.67GHz i7 and mildly-OCed ASUS GTX 660 (GPU: 1097MHz, Shader: 2194MHz, Memory: 3004 MHz).

If those of you that run the 660TI could post how long your rig takes to process one of those Nathans, that would be most helpful (me thinks...). Thanks!

Tom

I like to read all these Linux things as I still have issues with my Linux or even better Linux and I.
But it would be better to make a new thread for that as this is more about building a new PC.

You are correct and I have tried to restrain myself from going too far off-topic. My apologies if I have done so but I got the feeling tomba wanted to hear a little about Linux. Again, sorry if I've gone too far.

@skgiven

An area for Linux would be nice. As for app to control fan speed on Linux try my gpu_d script. If there is sufficient interest I'll improve it to handle all the GPUs in a single PC and, if the backend nvidia-settings binary supports LAN, I'll make the script support that too. Or if you would be more interested in re-flashing and fixing the self-serving temperature vs. fan speed curve some manufacturers seem to be building into their cards I can give links to what I've read about that. The only reason I haven't posted those links so far is because they're scattered all through my browser's bookmarks and it would take some time to round them all up and put them in a post here. I'll do it if anybody indicates they would find those links useful otherwise I won't bother wasting the time. Also, I thought most everybody here already knows about re-flashing their GPU BIOS.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

You are correct and I have tried to restrain myself from going too far off-topic. My apologies if I have done so but I got the feeling tomba wanted to hear a little about Linux. Again, sorry if I've gone too far.

No, no you are not going to far. But after a while it will be difficult to find all the bits and peaces of information. With more "dedicated" threads that will be easier.

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Greetings from TJ

Hi Tom,

The AMD CPU will come with a stock cooler. It is very easy to install and cools great. My system does 4 Rosetta's and 2 GPUGRID on two 660's and runs at 48-54°C with the stock cooler. It can make a lot of noise though if the room temperature becomes high. During summer in France even higher then in the Netherlands. but you can try first. The thermal past is already mounted on that cooler.

I would install an SSD though of 100 or 120 MB. Insight (a Europe) company has now 40% discounts on a Kingston SSD. If you can find that company in France too you could if have for around 50 Euro's.
It will be such a joy to install drivers, boot, upgrade BOINC boot, de-install driver, boot and use another set of drivers. And don't forget that you have to boot Windows many times due to security updates and such, or as a WU has don clocked the GPU clock. A thing that often occurs on my 660. The investment is worth while just as Zoltan explained.

Good luck with you choices.

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Greetings from TJ

Hi TJ,

The AMD CPU will come with a stock cooler. It is very easy to install and cools great. My system does 4 Rosetta's and 2 GPUGRID on two 660's and runs at 48-54°C with the stock cooler. It can make a lot of noise though if the room temperature becomes high. During summer in France even higher then in the Netherlands. but you can try first. The thermal past is already mounted on that cooler.

I think I'm committed to the already-purchased cooler but, if there's a decent cooler in the mobo box, I might try installing it in my i7 Dell, which makes too much CPU fan noise for me to run any Rosettas.

I would install an SSD though of 100 or 120 MB. Insight (a Europe) company has now 40% discounts on a Kingston SSD. If you can find that company in France too you could if have for around 50 Euro's.
It will be such a joy to install drivers, boot, upgrade BOINC boot, de-install driver, boot and use another set of drivers. And don't forget that you have to boot Windows many times due to security updates and such, or as a WU has don clocked the GPU clock. A thing that often occurs on my 660. The investment is worth while just as Zoltan explained.

I'm convinced. I looked at Insight France but there was no deal like your found locally. So I went for a 120GB SSD, and cradle, from Amazon France.

Tom

I got the feeling tomba wanted to hear a little about Linux.

Absolutely right, Dagorath! In fact, I decided to have a go at Linux on my Win7 PC while waiting for my PC build pieces to come together.

I installed and ran Virtualbox, which soon wanted a Ubuntu CD.

I downloaded the 12.04.3 ISO and inserted a new 700MB RW CD for the burn. "Not enough space on the CD"; the ISO is 724,992KB.

This is no place to solve my problem but can you point me at a list I can cry on? Thanks.

Tom

I downloaded the 12.04.3 ISO and inserted a new 700MB RW CD for the burn. "Not enough space on the CD"; the ISO is 724,992KB.

I had that problem too, downloaded a older version and updated.
Another option is to put it into a USB stick.
There's plety of forums talking about this (I find it very silly, that they did this). Search "ubuntu size 700MB" and you find more info.