How many watts does that system pull from the wall? If you were to run that 24/7 365 how much do you think the annual cost in electric would be? Do you think atm that the i7 2600K gives the best watts to ppd ratio? Or are there any GPU based systems that provide better watts/ppd?
Just trying to get a feel as to what would be the best bang for buck (purely in folding terms) and best watts to ppd ratio.
TIA.
CPUs have been the best ppd/watt for a long time now. GPUs are great performers and can put out lots of points, but they also use a lot more electric.
The
best ppd/watt systems are multi-cpu setups, namely an SR-2 with dual Xeon chips or a 4-way 12 core Magny-Cours setup from AMD (48 total cores). Of course, these systems have a much higher initial price than a single CPU or GPU, but once all is said and done nothing can beat these setups in terms of ppd/watt.
Here are some rough and conservative numbers to paint a picture: A 560 Ti uses 170 watts according to nVidia and will average let's say 15,000 ppd. That's 88ppd per watt. We'll disregard the rest of the system to make an even comparison to the CPU.
A 2600k @ 4.5ghz probably uses 120 watts or more. At 35,000ppd that's 292ppd per watt.
In contrast, my SR-2 can put out about 180,000 ppd with the right WU. I would guess at most the system uses 350-400 watts (2 80 Watt Xeon chips overclocked). That's 450ppd per watt.
Of course GPUs still have their place, they are probably the cheapest initial investment to start making a decent ppd right off the bat, and you can add 2 or 3 to a single rig. For me, it was worth the large upfront cost to have a setup that doesn't output much heat (living in Florida this was important).
