I have an i7 920@3600MHz on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 with 6 GB OCZ Reaper DDR3 1600@1440. Air-cooled with a Noctua NHU12P.

Joe That's a nice system. Are you using a GPU capable graphics card and roughly how much is your power bill?

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Have a crunching good day!!

Yes, the harder trick is to measure BTU output. But, as I say, probably proportional to power consumed. But there is also the reduced resistence, slower fan speed, less hard drive activity (checkpoints reached half as often), etc.

Ideally, with a farm, you'd find a way to use diskless systems either with network shares of a single drive, or flash.

We are discussing flash drives and how long they last in another thread, they have limited writes so may not be the best choice. I like the idea of network shares though! Load up one machines full of hard drives and then let all the others work off of it.
The flash drive discussion is in here https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=4973 and is some of the latest discussions

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I've been curious about heat rates. Obviously it varies by type of CPU. But it also varies by the % of CPU BOINC is using. Given like CPUs, has anyone studied the heat output of two machines running at 50% each, as compared to one machine running 100%? And I'm thinking power consumption of the machine would be roughly porportional to the heat output. Obviously you don't want to materially increase power consumption with a second machine like that, but you have to consider power used to cool the room (or room above it with thermostate) as well.

My thought is that 2 machines running at 50% will run significantly cooler, which lowers resistence etc. and is healthier for harddrive and other components. Just a question of total BTUs at the lower temp. And whether you can more then break even for powering two systems when factoring in the A/C usage of power.

It also depends on cases too, I have lots of machines but only one or two have the same case as the next computer. I am sure most people with 'farms' are like that, the machines tend to come in when they come in, not all at once.

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I bought my i7 920 because my old AMD X2 3800+ was to slow for gaming, especially emulation of PS2 (pcsx2). I wanted to use a new socket so that I can change the processor in the future. At this time I thought that Intel would stick to LGA1366 for a longer time (as it seems they wont).

But yes, I also had BOINC in mind when I bought the CPU. Maybe I would have waited a little longer with changing the CPU if I wasn't using BOINC.

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Joe That's a nice system. Are you using a GPU capable graphics card and roughly how much is your power bill?

Yes, I have got a CUDA-capable graphics card, but since Rosetta and LHC are the only projects I am running, I am not using it for crunching.

I can't tell about the electricity bill. In Germany, you pay a monthly rate, that is based on electricity consumption of the year before. I can tell in march next year...

Joe

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If it is of interest...

With these computers at home:

GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3065 @ 2.33GHz [Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 11]
GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5530 @ 2.40GHz [Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 5] Linux
GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 6] GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5472 @ 3.00GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 6] GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.70GHz [Family 6 Model 13 Stepping 6] Linux
GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz [Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1] Linux
GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz [Family 6 Model 9 Stepping 5]

The electric bill is around 150€/month (211 USD).
Country: Spain

Obviously, including the normal equipment for a house (except heating) like TV, washer, dishwasher, lights, microwaves, etc., etc.

Regards

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Joe That's a nice system. Are you using a GPU capable graphics card and roughly how much is your power bill?

Yes, I have got a CUDA-capable graphics card, but since Rosetta and LHC are the only projects I am running, I am not using it for crunching.

I can't tell about the electricity bill. In Germany, you pay a monthly rate, that is based on electricity consumption of the year before. I can tell in march next year...

Joe

Hi Jochen, I did hook a Kill A Watt EZ power meter to each of my 5 quad machines.
Each one consume different kwh. Our local electric company charges $0.93 cents/kwh. The following machines I tagged by it's motherboard consume this much:
1) P5K-E-$0.0164cents/hr, 2) P5K-E=$0.0144cents/hr, 3)P5K-V=$0.0125cents/hr,
4)P5Q SE=$0.0156cents/hr and 5) M3N78-VM=$0.0105cents/hr. Based on this data, I run my 5 quad machines 24/7 and 15hours daily, which cost me an average of $26.42/month. All cpu runs 75% usage crunching Rosetta@home and World Community Grid. I thought my volunteer work on power cost is all I can give for distributed computing, considering I built 5 quads dedicated to crunching.

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I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

I just read a really interesting article on Tom's hardware site about under-volting your cpu to cut down on the electric bill. The were able to bring the voltage down about 17% on AMD Phenom II 955, and about 17-20% on the Core 2's and still run them very stable. But it cut about 70 watts/hour off of the power consumption of both processors. Full article is here...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/undervolt-cpu-phenom,2348-9.html

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Hi Jochen, I did hook a Kill A Watt EZ power meter to each of my 5 quad machines.
Each one consume different kwh. Our local electric company charges $0.93 cents/kwh. The following machines I tagged by it's motherboard consume this much:
1) P5K-E-$0.0164cents/hr, 2) P5K-E=$0.0144cents/hr, 3)P5K-V=$0.0125cents/hr,
4)P5Q SE=$0.0156cents/hr and 5) M3N78-VM=$0.0105cents/hr. Based on this data, I run my 5 quad machines 24/7 and 15hours daily, which cost me an average of $26.42/month. All cpu runs 75% usage crunching Rosetta@home and World Community Grid. I thought my volunteer work on power cost is all I can give for distributed computing, considering I built 5 quads dedicated to crunching.

I am curious...why only 15 hours per day?

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