Recommendations on used cards for Folding

[MeeLee]

I don't know where you are getting your prices, but a new 2060 is still well over $300 everywhere I look and the super is well over $400. The KO is much closer to the $300 mark new, but that doesn't make sense when I can get a used one for much less. It is also rare to find a used RTX 2070 under $300 and the supers seem to be almost always around the $400 mark.

While it is a novel idea to have a brand new RTX 3080 for folding, there is just no way for me. Not only is the price far too high (they will likely never sell for the $700 MSRP even when they are readily available), but that caliber of card would be go in my gaming system where I do care about heat, noise, and power consumption. I just want to add a second, used card to my secondary system where the noise, heat, and power does not matter; something that I can add and "write off" the cost to a good cause hence the $300 budget.

Nevertheless, I will likely wait a bit before I make any sort of purchase anyway since the other RTX 30 cards and RDNA2 releases will also likely decrease the used market pricing.

I guess you missed the window.
3-4 months ago, they could be found for ~280-ish, and the KO was 300, and the Super was like 320.
I'm sure prices go down again. It's just due to COVID.
Nvidia's MSRP for the 3080 was supposed to be $500-600. In a month or two, there might even be some refurbs for $50-100 off.
I guess they grossly underestimated the popularity, and finally decided to up the prices, closer to the 2000 series.
After all, people were still buying a $1200 2080Tis (I got mine mostly for $900-1000/unit). Selling them for 500-600. It would make sense to sell the 3080 initially for $1k, and lower as supply meets demand.
From the numbers, the 3080 is certainly a better buy, even over a 2080Ti, that is, if you have to buy a new one.
However, performance wise the 3090 is the only one that stands out.
The 3080 isn't a significant improvement over the 2080Ti. I wouldn't sell my 2080Ti to buy a 3080.


As far as 1M PPD goes on a 1600 series GPU,
That's only if you're folding 24/7.
It appeared to me that the OP was looking for something not continuous.

[gunnarre]

The numbers come from a Chrome Extension for the F@H web client with real time PPD benchmark database gives feedback on your PPD by GPU model and WU.

How does the averaging deal with optimized core versions? Core 22 is faster than Core 21 in OpenCL, and CUDA will be faster still.

[foldy]

Looks like with FAHcore optimizations we get nvidia GPUs faster by 25% every year. And with bigger work units and higher atom count also the high shader count AMD GPUs now can get fully used - and the new nvidia RTX 30X0 too.

[MeeLee]

I'd say CUDA might work when running an RTX 3080 or 3090 together with a lower GPU (2080 or lower).
The 3000 series GPUs have too much shaders/cores for most WUs. So it could help out.

[marknd59]

The numbers come from a Chrome Extension for the F@H web client with real time PPD benchmark database gives feedback on your PPD by GPU model and WU.

How does the averaging deal with optimized core versions? Core 22 is faster than Core 21 in OpenCL, and CUDA will be faster still.

It dosen't what it is intended to do is give realtime information. It grabs a baseline PPD for the GPU and project you are currently folding for you to see how your system compares to the community average. GPU performance update stats are real-time to show you +/- percent changes in PPD performance as you use or tweak your system.

You can checkout how it all wroks at -

https://folding.lar.systems/

[foldy]

Maybe you want to add the project's atom count to the https://folding.lar.systems/
Then we can see if PPD is high or low for a project depending on atom count.
This shows example code how to get infos about a project http://www.linuxforge.net/bonuscalc2.php

[gordonbb]

Also don’t forget to think about the efficiency of the cards. I’d rather run a GTX1660Ti than a 1070Ti as it will produce around the same PPD using less power. In general the newer the GPU architecture the more efficient it runs. Better efficiency leads to a smaller electrical bill and less fan noise.