I would recommend sticking to 780's or 900 series - either 970 or 980
the 9pp series run cooler and use less power
 
if your into the points and doing the most then top end is it
 
if your into gaming - then 780 or high end maxwell is it
we have games being designws and are out now that require Maxwell 970 Minimum with 4GB ram already
 

I'm going to switch my 4p to crunching on the cpu's and adding a 770 and 970 on them for folding.

david12857
Still cannot believe this is happening. I loved seeing all of these BigAdv systems being built. If others have 2P/4P BigAdv system pics they're welcome to post here. Truly a sad week.
 

2) The BA experiment will permanently end on January 31, 2015. On that date, the servers will be set to accept only and we will have no plans for future BA WUs.

 
On a more positive note I have several hundred EVGA bucks and plenty of space for a proper video card or two. What's the best video card for $400? Are there any other changes or things worth waiting for in the near future? I haven't been around or following things and kinda feel like a n00b atm.
 

 
Xigmatek Elysium case
ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard
Intel Xeon E5 2660 CPUs
Xigmatek Dark Knight II CPU coolers
Corsair Vengeance 16GB Quad Channel DDR3 1600 x 2

I cannot believe they are abandoning the BigAdv as it has such a high output. As was stated in earlier posts, they must see the longview in GPUs as the most productive method of production moving forward.
So, from my experience, the GTX 980 (at this date of posting) is what you want to drop in to your open card slot. I just bought one and it is literally outperforming 2 GTX 780s  overclocked, with far less power and heat. I paid $500.00 + and have no regrets. Bigger, badder, better by a longshot. Just look at my recent results on EOC. In fact I am going to buy another very soon.
 
Hmm......Did I mention ONE stock 980 is outproducing TWO 780s Overclocked with a 1000 watt PSU? guess I did--
Not to be crass or a smarty, but ---you get the idea.
 
ps If anyone would like to buy a nice 780 SC or 780 FTW--PM me. 
Cheers!
rs

What do you get SMP wise bill on the 4P? And is yours the big boy or little bro 4P?  
Mine unfortunately only has one PCIx slot, otherwise that would be a great idea like wrinvert said.

RIP Mr. BigAdv

I'll do that when I get home... can't remember the # of PCI-E slots but it's a 16 gig, AMD 6168's OC'd to 2.13 GHZ with the [H] Bios and Hyper-V 212's with the Musky mod.

From the Official FAH Blog:
http://folding.stanford.edu/home/blogBig
 
Adv Program Ends January 31
January 31, 2015 by Vijay Pande ·
As we have previously announced, the bigadv (BA) program will reach end-of-life on January 31, 2015.  We would like to thank all the donors who have contributed to the program.  Throughout the history of Folding@home, donor participation has enabled us to tackle hard problems and engage in bold experiments.  The BA program is an example of both of these––the projects in BA are one that simply could not have been addressed otherwise.  We are still analyzing the results of these projects, but the preliminary data already yields some exciting results that we are comparing to experiments.
Although the BA program is ending, we recognize that the many-core systems previously used to run BA may not perform optimally on all work units in the Folding@home ecosystem (although they will do quite well on most).  In an ideal world, we would have each project performance-benchmarked on a wide variety of systems and a dynamic allocation scheme that matches clients to projects that perform well on their hardware while ensuring a distribution of client capability across Folding@home scientific priorities.  However, this sort of matching is more technically involved (and places larger demands on the assignment server) than we are able to offer at this time.  At BA end-of-life, in order to make sure that these many-core get WUs best suited for them, clients continuing to use the BA flags will be directed to large work units, although these will carry the normal Folding@Home points scheme rather than a BA scheme.  We are planning to expand the diversity of these work units to include a variety of “large” simulation problems, but at this point we are not making statements as to the anticipated longevity of this scheme.
Thank you once again for contributing to Folding@home, whether the BA program or any of our other initiatives.  All our past and future scientific achievements are due to your participation and generosity.

Viper97
No thanks...

+1

so I've gotten 2 8106 on my 4p systems that are ppd higher then BA units right before they died? they went from 250ish ppg avg for 8101-8015 down to a low of 100k ppd just before the end. the 8106 is over 200k atm on both systems :-)

yeah I looked for the project and found nothing, its not even listed at http://fah-web.stanford.edu/new/psummaryC.html but it is on the normal http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummaryC.html just no information

bill1024
There is a 8108 too, the time has been extended to 4 days the K factor is lowered to 39 from 49.
 
So I take it these are "enhanced SMP" WUs.
What is the min. core count to get these?
Using the BA flag we will send you large WUs, give less points than the BA units and not call it BA.
Call it B* maybe.

It is listed as GRO_A5, is this not the flag for bigadv ?

Good to hear that there is appropriate work for all the people who built 2p or 4p server rigs. I kind of expected a big dip in the teams ppd with BA getting shut down. With this news it seems like it will business as usual 

25.5 or yeah about on par for the 8439 rig
30.5 on my 8425

Depends on your rig, but I have gone from a max of 1.2m PPD to a max of 1.43m PPD

Seeing the same thing as you guys are on my rig also.. I've received 8016 and 8108 wu's so far.
I got a couple of regular SMP wu's once the deadline passed, but these A5's are great! PPD better than -bigadv by a bit.
Never got rid of the -bigadv flag in case you were wondering.