Supercomputers - The cheapest route.

[Caelus]

lol no where near Radeon 5830 draws about 170w under full load the 5850 160+ max and the 5870 only draws about 188w. Don't believe me google them

Sorry, used the wrong words lol, was talking about the recomended power supply, data offered by the companies, not how much wattage they need to well, "work" ^ ^



XFX one (compare the 3 models)

Sapphire one

Well, if I was buyin' them, i wouldn't take that risk, but meh, that's my opinion ^ ^

[Thorn]

Hackers Movie Trailer

Sorry it just had to be said

Wait. William Gibson is THAT Gibson?

BTW, have you been to the pool on the roof?

[drgr33n]

Sorry, used the wrong words lol, was talking about the recommended power supply, data offered by the companies, not how much wattage they need to well, "work" ^ ^

Well ATI also recommend 650w+ for crossfire on these cards so your still within the recommendations. On that second link you posted they recommend 600w+ so i suppose that's just a matter of opinion. Not to mention that I have a very similar setup using that power supply and it's now been mining bitcoins for 3 days solid and not a flicker. My cards and the proc has been constantly at 99% load.

The reason why they recommend 500w over is that they still draw 170+ and that's still a lot of power. But what I will say is anything over two cards and your defo going to need a bigger supply.

You didn't make any mention of the cost of your hard drives, case, or cooling method.

I wanted to build something similar that I was just looking up for fun. But I don't have the money available at the moment. I would beef that up a little bit.

I saw a very nice asus dual socket motherboard with 2 or 4 PCI-E x16 slots.
If I remember correctly they were intel socket 1366. Yes, that means dual i7's, and if you have the cash you can put in for the black edition (or whatever they are calling it with the i7's) and run water cooling so you can overclock if you want.
DDR3 RAM
I would say it doesn't matter too much as to whether you use ATi or Nvidia as long as your cards are GDDR5 and 1GB GRAM. These will become the first thing you upgrade in the future. Next the hard drive will be SSD for the OS, and seperate SATA hard drives for data storage. If you wanted redundancy. I would RAID 1 SSD's and RAID 5 the SATA.
I would dual boot with 2 SSD's and setup a decent RAID5 SATA configuration.

Get a decent case and water cool it. As far as a power supply you will want to get a 1000W probably, but this may be overkill depending on what you do.
Even with water cooling you want to put a couple nice fans in for airflow this is especially true for the hard drives. (It's overkill to watercool the hard drives.)

Remember, you get what you pay for. This would cost quite a bit but I hope you get some idea's.

Many thanks for your input. I think thats going to cost quite a bit more hehehe I don't know how much SSD's are going for nowa days but last time I looked they were £300+ each

I do agree an bringing it up to the present (ie. ddr3, i7 cores) but again that will make quite a big difference in the price. Remember the purpose of this post is to build the cheapest supercomputer not just a supercomputer hehehe. As for the case etc I think I did mention a case but you can get one for around £15 and fans what £30 for 3 or so ? Or just pester friends to give up as many as they have lol.

Wait. William Gibson is THAT Gibson?

BTW, have you been to the pool on the roof?

lol do you think we could get rock's linux on them ?

EDIT:

The talk of SSD's and clustering got me thinking what about if we drop the case and build something to hold about 5 or so of these motherboards etc. Save some money using class 10 SDHC memory cards and running a cluster with 2 cards to each board ? Using the better components I listed each kit would cost you around £359. Then instead of cooling them individually using a big fan like http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...0CGcQ8wIwAjgK# at £25 lol. Thats over 16Tflops of power for £1795 or for the pyrit fans theoretically around 700000 PMK/s.

[thorin]

Wait. William Gibson is THAT Gibson?

I'm not sure, I just couldn't help myself in a thread about super computers and someone mentioning a Gibson (whether relevant or not).

[bofh28]

Personally I would get an Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard. It has 4x PCI Express 2.0 x16 @x16. Yes it is $400 but it is a solid platform and will make your life easier when you want to add a third or fourth video card. You can save money by starting with 1 video card and adding more later.