Former miner, help me get these GPU's folding

[boywonder]

So I have about 60-70 nvidia rtx 3070's to 3090's that were used for cryptocurrency mining. Since mining is now not worth the cost, I'm looking for some good karma and looking to put these into use. I was thinking about putting 2 gpu's in a tower, looking to maybe start with 10-15 open frame atx towers.

What kind of hardware should I be looking for?
I was thinking maybe air-cooled 13th gen i5's or i7's with motherboards with 2x pci 4.0 slots.

What kind of CPU should I be running?

And would it be more effective if I ran a 2.5" SATA ssd instead of a nvme to save pci lanes for the gpu's to compute?

thanks for your input!

[BobWilliams757]

You don't need much CPU unless you are going to be doing CPU folding. Even if that is the case, you can easily use older and lesser CPU's for feeding the GPU's you have.

PCIE 3.0 x 8 should feed the 3070's without issue, not sure it would be quite enough for the 3090s. But even many cheaper motherboards have both a x8 and an x16. Be sure there is enough space to get the GPU's in the slots if running two.

As for CPU, people were running 3 series GPU's on stuff like Pentium Gold G6400's and such, granted not CPU folding.

As for lanes, as long as you have enough to run a couple GPU's, no need to worry about saving them. If you find a MB that will fit multiple GPU's concerns like that might come into the picture. Many often limit folding rigs to one or two GPU's each, as MB costs and power supply costs go up quickly if you want to run too many in one case or rack. It also allows for taking them down for maintenance easier while most gear keeps running.


With that many GPU's you could probably due some trading for cases and rigs, maybe even stuff with everything but the GPU's. It would make things quick and easy to get folding on.

[toTOW]

Anyway, I would avoid any CPU that have big.LITTLE architectures ... it's a pain to handle on FAH ...

So any cheap CPU should be fine, as long as you have one CPU core free per GPU to feed it. I'd go with at least 4 GB of RAM par GPU to be safe. And make sure to have at least PCIe 8x lanes per GPU.

[kiore]

RE the PCIE lanes, many people fold with risers and on slots with less than the reccomended 8 and it does work however this will tend bottle neck and reduce your contribution but not your power usage so the minimum of PCIE3 x 8 above is about effectiveness, I suggest you use what you have where possible where it meets the reccomendations above. Why not try just one system with two cards to start and see how you go, this will guide your choices on the next ones.

[nchowlett]

Folks, what sort of reduction in contribution are you getting if using PCIE slots of smaller type?

I'm running GPUs via down to PCIE x4 and noticed a drop of less than 5-10% of contribution compared to PCIE x16. Given 2 of 4 slots are not above x8 on my 'enterprise' motherboard, might be worth it given cost of buying hardware for second machine (assuming running 4 GPUs).