best platform for folding?

[ShadowHunter]

I am thinking of building a server for my house, and I'd like to factor in the best platform for folding in my decision. AMD, Intel, or Mac? I know this is a Mac board, but try to be as unbiased as possible And as far as Mac goes, if it is superior, is the G4 "good enough" to be superior to AMD/Intel?

Thanks

 

[Cprossu]

OC-AMD would say that a dual xeon rig is your best choice, having dealt with alot of A64's myself i think a dual opteron rig would be your best choice , although on the other hand dual g5's do make good folders and wonderful servers .

so it's all about what you are comfortable with

 

[bousozoku]

For Tinker work units, a lowly Duron is substantially faster than a higher-clocked G4. However, for Gromacs work units, it goes completely the opposite way.

The G5's excellent floating point performance makes the G4 look as if it's going in reverse, but the AltiVec unit on the G5 is not consistently powerful in comparison.

In any case, G5 or Athlon64 then, Athlon XP or Xeon or P4 then, Duron or G4, G3, Celeron.

 

[brap]

It depends if you just want the machine to fold, or as a fileserver, or indeed as a main workstation. If the latter is true, then a G5 dual sounds good -- otherwise go for something you can build on the cheap, and run a Linux distro on.

In any case, G5 or Athlon64 then, Athlon XP or Xeon or P4 then, Duron or G4, G3, Celeron.

I think that's a little biased - there were threads here which mentioned that a dual G5 2.0 took just as long as my XP2800 to finish a Tinker frame (of course, complexity allowing). Now I know from personal experience that fa-ast P4s are much better than Athlons - I swapped out a P4 2.4 for an XP2800 and saw a drop in productivity on the whole. So, logic says a P4 with HT and SSE2 will be even better, and a dual Xeon HT, with the ability to run 4 WUs simultaneously sounds awesome.
This then, in the scheme of things puts the G5 on a par with the Athlon 32-bit (Faster Gromacs, slower Tinkers) with the Opteron/A64 as an unknown quantity for me at least. They do have the SSE2 instruction set, but as to how well it would perform against the HT Xeons? Who knows...

 

[bousozoku]

It depends if you just want the machine to fold, or as a fileserver, or indeed as a main workstation. If the latter is true, then a G5 dual sounds good -- otherwise go for something you can build on the cheap, and run a Linux distro on.

I think that's a little biased - there were threads here which mentioned that a dual G5 2.0 took just as long as my XP2800 to finish a Tinker frame (of course, complexity allowing). Now I know from personal experience that fa-ast P4s are much better than Athlons - I swapped out a P4 2.4 for an XP2800 and saw a drop in productivity on the whole. So, logic says a P4 with HT and SSE2 will be even better, and a dual Xeon HT, with the ability to run 4 WUs simultaneously sounds awesome.
This then, in the scheme of things puts the G5 on a par with the Athlon 32-bit (Faster Gromacs, slower Tinkers) with the Opteron/A64 as an unknown quantity for me at least. They do have the SSE2 instruction set, but as to how well it would perform against the HT Xeons? Who knows...

It may be biased but it's what I've seen from the Stanford forums, not from here. People here tend to compare one protein with another and make wild assumptions that lack continuity. Later P4s, for example, seem better with hyper-threading enabled. Older units worked better with it disabled. Gromacs work units on AthlonXP work okay with 3Dnow! but work better when SSE is enabled.

 

[brap]

It may be biased but it's what I've seen from the Stanford forums, not from here. People here tend to compare one protein with another and make wild assumptions that lack continuity.

Point taken. I was trying to use as much firsthand experience as possible to avoid just that.

Later P4s, for example, seem better with hyper-threading enabled. Older units worked better with it disabled. Gromacs work units on AthlonXP work okay with 3Dnow! but work better when SSE is enabled.

Surely any HT P4 would be more efficient running two, as an effective pair of slower SSE2 P4s? Weird. I also never knew there was a switch for 3DNow as opposed to SSE for XPs, maybe I'll give that a whirl next time I have access to my crapbox.