12th of February

Farm status
Intel GPUs
One i7-8700 running, others off

Nvidia GPUs
One running, the rest off

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP4 work


Crunching news
The hot humid weather broke for a few days so I had most of the farm running a mix of Asteroids and Einstein work. It got hot again so they’re mostly off now.

Einstein are doing a tuning run for their O2 Gravity wave work so I have been running them on different machines to see how they go. When you look at the times per work unit you can see the i7-8700 is the fastest.

Intel i7-6700 running 8 approx 34,100 sec = 4,262.5 sec/WU
Intel i7-8700 running 12 approx 39,500 sec = 3,291.66 sec/WU
AMD Ryzen 7-1700 running 16 approx 56,000 sec = 3,500 sec/WU


Hardware upgrades
I placed the order for another 5 x i7-8700 machines comprising motherboard (ASUS Prime Z370-P), CPU (i7-8700), cooler (Noctua U9S), memory (Kingston 16GB DDR4 2666MHz kit) and one more case (Fractal Design ARC Midi R2). Unfortunately the coolers are out of stock until the 23rd of February.

I am going to reuse four cases that currently have i7-6700’s. I have already got one new machine in a new case running and there is one on this order. The cases appear to be discontinued.

I had hoped to get 24GB of memory in the new builds but Kingston doesn’t appear to have any 8GB (2 x 4GB) memory kits, only the 16GB kits. I wanted to use a 16GB plus an 8GB kit. The price is also rather high at the moment as 2666GHz memory is relatively new.

It is expected updated Ryzen CPU’s will be released in April so that will be the next major upgrade. I think all it will offer is a higher clock speed while still being able to use the existing motherboards and chipsets. I don’t expect extra cores, but maybe they will tweak the cache as well.