For the last few weeks, I've had a 12gb 3080 and a 3070ti (both EVGA FTW3) sitting in boxes waiting to be put to use. My original plan was to upgrade my main desktop from the gtx960 that it has been running for years. I'd never make use of either card while gaming, but my desktop was a good option for housing both GPUs for folding...or so I thought. I finally installed the 3080 a few days ago and realized that while the 3070ti would also fit in the case, the the top card would not have any breathing room to keep cool. Unfortunately, this left the 3070ti without a home.
Digging through my limited supply of old hardware, I came across an old HTPC from around 2011:
ASRock H67M-ITX motherboard (yes, a tiny itx board)
i3-2100t (2 cores)
2x2gb DDR3-1333 ram
This motherboard has a single PCI-e 2.0 x16 slot. Finding out how old (and tiny) this system was, I started having doubts that the 3070ti would work, much less fold.
I cleaned out the decade of dust:
Installed the tiny ITX board into a spare case:
And, finally, installed the 3070ti:
There were some issues booting with the 3070ti outputting to the display, but the onboard video worked around the issue. Soon, I was presented with an old copy of Windows 7! It had 4gb of space free on the 60gb ssd. I uninstalled a slew of old software that wouldn't be needed and to free up some extra space.
Nvidia drivers for Windows 7 installed without a hitch. I didn't even know they still released drivers for Windows 7. Folding@Home also installed without issue. It wasn't too long before this ancient system with a new GPU was folding.
I'm quite impressed that this system is able to fold on the 3070ti. I'm even more impressed at the performance. I have another system with a 3070ti (currently not powered on) that will get about 5.4 million ppd in Windows 10 on p18201. This old windows 7 system with a dual core processor and pci-e 2.0 is getting about 4.4 million ppd!
I'll eventually re-work some of my other systems to move this 3070ti to a faster, more capable system for better folding performance. But for now, Oogway will fold on!