Hi,
I currently am running a Dell R720 server with dual 2.90 Xeons and 256GB of RAM. I am interested in converting my farm of 4211 K32 plots to BB C06 plots. What will be my max size of a farm without running a GPU for the decompressor or will this be a must?
Thanks!
I think the cutoff is C5 before you need a GPU.
You might actually be OK at C6 with dual Xeons. However, before you plot your entire farm, you can create one plot and run BladeBit simulate. This will show your maximum farm size given your exact hardware. More info (and other easier, but less precise techniques) can be found here:
Worst case scenario I need to install a 8GB video card or larger to handle the C6 plots Correct?
A harvesting GPU doesn’t even need 8GB. Only around 600 MB are required for C7, and likely less for C6. The doc originally misstated that 8 GB was require for harvesting, but this has since been corrected.
(8 GB is required for CUDA plotting, though)
You can plot each compression level, then run a test command to simulate your max farm size and adjust accordingly.
Overall, GPU is more efficient and scales better, but CPU can work fine on small compression levels.
You can maybe run c6, but at the cost of much more power.
C5 needs significantly less power, while the size difference is minimal.
But run the simulate command on a few plots to be sure.
Also, the plot filter will change next years, so compute needed for decompression will double at that time
I tried BB C7 with Ryzen 9 3950X 4.1GHz…it uses only 80W extra, but proofs are slow…over 10s.
According to Chia white paper, C5 is most likely last CPU farmable compression.
GH C5 is most efficient in my tests.
GH C5 with a pair of E5-2680 v2 was the best I could do on one of my R720s running the first Gigahorse compression version (not the current second-gen version with the C11+ options).