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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Micro PC Crunshing |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 22
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Hardnews
Senior Cruncher England Joined: Oct 11, 2008 Post Count: 151 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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It's a long time since I posted, but have recently moved to a smaller, er, mansion.
----------------------------------------My last rig is/was an 2011 i7-2600K /16GB ram built just for WCG. That's still running someplace, but Intel moves on. We have Skylake now and that promises plenty of crunch for less power. I needed a small desktop and have just added a Dell Optiplex Micro 3040. This is the size of a paperback book, but boasts an i3-6100T and 8GB ram, 500GB disk. Dual core with H/threading. Currently, it doesn't even get warm, powered from a 65 watt laptop brick. If you have any micro PC's running, I'd be interested to see 'em. Here's the BOINC=marks: 16/10/2016 08:38:52 | | Benchmark results: 16/10/2016 08:38:52 | | Number of CPUs: 4 16/10/2016 08:38:52 | | 2882 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU 16/10/2016 08:38:52 | | 8179 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU And the WEI: CPU: 7.3 RAM: 7.8 (edited three times uploading an image)  [Edit 4 times, last edit by Hardnews at Oct 16, 2016 7:51:51 AM] |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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It's OK...cheap for a 4cores (4day per day of crunching)! ;)
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Hardnews
Senior Cruncher England Joined: Oct 11, 2008 Post Count: 151 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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It's now fitted to a VESA mount behind the monitor. Invisible crunching and low energy bills!
It's hard to deal with Dell online pricing, this was 40% off in a 'Doorbuster' deal, which disappeared the next day. Very nice machine (at the price.) |
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ThreadRipper
Veteran Cruncher Sweden Joined: Apr 26, 2007 Post Count: 1324 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I've had plans for Compute stick crunching for quite some time, but I haven't yet gotten to it. There's either the quad core atoms z8300 and 3GB RAM which I think may be fanless, or there's the more expensive ones with i3 and i5 CPUs with 4GB RAM with fan cooling.
----------------------------------------Stacking up lots of compute sticks into a HDMI-switch or something to a monitor would be nice. Should take up very little space and provide quite a few cores at least. Another idea I've had was to go with Intel NUCs or Gigabyte Brix, since these can be bought pretty bare-bone and then configured with WCG crunching in mind. Those machines should be able to handle a beefier CPU in each (but also cost a lot more than compute sticks). They are small enough also to attach several of them behind some monitor.  Join The International Team: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=CK9RP1BKX1 AMD TR2990WX @ PBO, 64GB Quad 3200MHz 14-17-17-17-1T, RX6900XT @ Stock AMD 3800X @ PBO AMD 2700X @ 4GHz |
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Hardnews
Senior Cruncher England Joined: Oct 11, 2008 Post Count: 151 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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The Gigabyte Brix thing is on Amazon UK at a very good price at the moment.
----------------------------------------I went with the Optiplex for the low energy i3-6100T which, Passmark says, is faster than the Q series quad core I had lying around. The other plus (for me) is Windows 7, a dying OS but still supplied with the Optiplex. (It ran well on Linux Mint.) The NUCS are tempting for a Micro PC, there's also a Lenovo stick PC for about the same price. One of the other contenders is a low energy Celeron fan-less N3050 laptop I have, but the Opti runs 24/7 behind the desktop monitor, is faster, and plays French Internet Radio all day. The Sumvision Cyclone also looks interesting: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sumvision-Cyclone-Wi...=8-3&keywords=mini+pc [Edit 1 times, last edit by Hardnews at Oct 17, 2016 7:44:09 PM] |
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ThreadRipper
Veteran Cruncher Sweden Joined: Apr 26, 2007 Post Count: 1324 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Hmmm...what about this setup: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0123Z0LR...6&smid=A3IRU7Q642HWMA
----------------------------------------You get a miniITX board with a passively cooled 4-thread AMD A4-5000 CPU @ 15W (perhaps it is a good idea to have some air-flow still). So a couple of 4GB DDR3 RAM modules, a cheap SSD or quiet 2.5" HDD and a low-power PSU should do the trick. It won't be a speed monster but one can get 4 simultaneous threads for pretty cheap. A stack of these in acrylic cases maybe... :D Join The International Team: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=CK9RP1BKX1 AMD TR2990WX @ PBO, 64GB Quad 3200MHz 14-17-17-17-1T, RX6900XT @ Stock AMD 3800X @ PBO AMD 2700X @ 4GHz |
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Hardnews
Senior Cruncher England Joined: Oct 11, 2008 Post Count: 151 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I had a Mini-ITX thing a few years ago with passive cooling. Worked very well. About the only annoying thing was you couldn't hear any fan noise, so had to keep checking the screen to make sure it was on.
The Optiplex 3040M is a few weeks old now, inaudible behind the monitor on a VESA mount. When Sandy Bridge I7 came out around 2011 or so I was writing that we were entering a 'Golden Age' of high FLOP/ low consumption CPUs, wrong by a factor of about five years. :-) Back to the plot, there's always the temptation to head to Ebay for another used dual Xeon box, but fuel prices in the UK never go down, unlike the price of five year-old crunch processors. So the i3-6100T (TDP 35 watts) in the Opti is doing pretty well, and not heating the room up, unlike the I7-2600K (TDP 90 watts) it replaced. It's down by four hyper-threading cores, but up on power savings. :-) |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I just added my first Intel Compute Stick w/Linux. It only has 1GB memory and 8GB storage, but I only plan to use it for WCG. So far it is running smoothly and is only warm to the touch.
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ThreadRipper
Veteran Cruncher Sweden Joined: Apr 26, 2007 Post Count: 1324 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I had a Mini-ITX thing a few years ago with passive cooling. Worked very well. About the only annoying thing was you couldn't hear any fan noise, so had to keep checking the screen to make sure it was on. The Optiplex 3040M is a few weeks old now, inaudible behind the monitor on a VESA mount. When Sandy Bridge I7 came out around 2011 or so I was writing that we were entering a 'Golden Age' of high FLOP/ low consumption CPUs, wrong by a factor of about five years. :-) Back to the plot, there's always the temptation to head to Ebay for another used dual Xeon box, but fuel prices in the UK never go down, unlike the price of five year-old crunch processors. So the i3-6100T (TDP 35 watts) in the Opti is doing pretty well, and not heating the room up, unlike the I7-2600K (TDP 90 watts) it replaced. It's down by four hyper-threading cores, but up on power savings. :-) Thanks for the input on miniITX! Considering the low cost and 15W TDP CPU it may even run 24/7 on a car battery hooked up to solar panels (during summer up here in the North where The Winter is Coming :)) Yeah, fuel prices never go down in Sweden either. "Oh oil priced dropped, we shall fill that gap in tax income by raising the tax"...and depression is back! :/ I have never run a multi-cpu xeon but I've had plans on doing so...so far they are only plans though. Join The International Team: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=CK9RP1BKX1 AMD TR2990WX @ PBO, 64GB Quad 3200MHz 14-17-17-17-1T, RX6900XT @ Stock AMD 3800X @ PBO AMD 2700X @ 4GHz |
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ThreadRipper
Veteran Cruncher Sweden Joined: Apr 26, 2007 Post Count: 1324 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I just added my first Intel Compute Stick w/Linux. It only has 1GB memory and 8GB storage, but I only plan to use it for WCG. So far it is running smoothly and is only warm to the touch. Oh, that sounds promising. Does the 1GB of RAM rely suffice...even for Linux? What Points per day figures are you getting from it? Join The International Team: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=CK9RP1BKX1 AMD TR2990WX @ PBO, 64GB Quad 3200MHz 14-17-17-17-1T, RX6900XT @ Stock AMD 3800X @ PBO AMD 2700X @ 4GHz |
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