What Hardware Should I Buy? - August 2009

Protein Origami

Since we've recently educated you all in what makes the perfect folding farm, we've folded James's arm and got the in-house guru's help to spec this month's Protein Origami rig.

It's not the GeForce GTX 295 ppd behemoth that some of you have, we admit, but its price-for-ppd output is excellent and perfect for either getting started or adding to a farm that needs to grow.

Starting off with MSI's multi-PCI-Express-slotted K9A2 Platinum and throwing in a cheap and cheerful Athlon II X2 250 saves a bundle of money and power. Add in 4GB of DDR2-800 and that's plenty to keep it all going while the four GPUs take the strain.

While in the feature we suggested the use of Antec cases, in this I'm going to throw in a Cooler Master Scout because it's just £70 and it has tonnes of fan placements. It's also got a useful handle if you need to move things around for seasonal adjustments (hot rooms, etc) but that also means the case cannot be easily stacked to save space. If you want to do things a little cheaper, the Antec Three Hundred is still the best alternative.


MSI K9A2 Platinum: UK | US
AMD Athlon II X2 250: UK | US
4GB DDR2-800MHz: UK | US
Cooler Master Scout: UK | US

The M12D might be the single most expensive piece of equipment here, but when you're loading the machine 24/7 reliability is absolutely crucial - this is why we've gone for Seasonic. Finding something with four PCI-Express connectors means we have to look to the higher wattages, so we've gone for the 750W version that includes this quantity.

Seasonic M12D 750W PSU: UK | US

To cool the Athlon II the Akasa AK-876 is certainly suitable for the task, and isn't so big it impedes the use of memory slots either. For our US friends there are no Akasa products though, so the next best thing is the very cheap Cooler Master TX3. It's a bit of a pain to install on the AMD socket but it works well enough.

Western Digital WD2500AAJS 250GB SATA Hard Disk: UK | US
Akasa AK-876 AMD CPU cooler UK
Cooler Master Hyper TX3: US

Now for the core of your farm: Nvidia GPUs. Previously the GeForce 9600 GSO GDDR3 was the king of performance-to-value in terms of ppd output with its 96 shaders and GDDR3, all for very little money, and for our States-side friends the Asus cards for $55 are a bargain.

Palit GeForce GTS 250 512MB GDDR3: UK
ASUS EN9600GSO 512MB GDDR3: US

Finding the same in the UK for sub £60 is impossible though. In that respect we've turned our attention to the slightly more expensive GeForce GTS 250 512MB which is about 48 per cent faster. The MSI board allows dual slot cards so for a nose over £300 we can squeeze in four of the Palit cards we've spec'd below providing a ppd of close to 22,000.

That's all for this month. As always, your feedback in the comments is very much appreciated!