Official TBCS Folding Team

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Originally Posted by Fuganater

I can't even download the clients dude... All 3 have to download or it fails.

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Huh. I've never had them fail before but I think Oneslowz28 or someone else did. I'm not sure how to get around that. This is all I could find that was relevant. You might just have to wait for the workaround or for the links to be fixed again. You can fold manually until you can get the tracker to work though.


As for power bills, I've not shut my computer off other than for updates that required a restart in about 2 months now. It's folding when I'm not gaming and has only cost about $30 so far.

I got Project: Rage put together last night! I'll finish installing drivers and get folding ASAP. i7 2600k and 2x 260's should do pretty good.

Finally some real stats!! 23.3k PPD

Sounds about right. Good to have you putting out some good numbers. :D

So I "think" I've started getting myself setup to be part of the team, not really sure what I'm doing though as I've never set this up before, as far as I can tell I'v got the CPU folding all running fine but GPU folding doesn't look like it's gonna wanna "jive" with my 5670's.

Anyone got any ideas of how I could get my 2 ATI cards to work? Not sure how much of a difference they will make but I assume it's like having 2 more cores running.

I'm using V6 GPU2 and it just starts up, gives me the video hardware error message and shuts down.

I suggest you try the FAH GPU tracker v2 if you're new to this - it makes setting custom flags much easier - you may need to use the R800 forced GPU to make it work - and if the cards are set up in crossfire, you're out of luck (I think) unless you're willing to un-crossfire them - my 4870 gets about 2500ppd so it isnt huge but every point helps - from what I read, you may see as much as 3500ppd from each card...

Good luck

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Originally Posted by slaveofconvention

I suggest you try the FAH GPU tracker v2 if you're new to this - it makes setting custom flags much easier

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Is that the same as the GPU2 version? Or you talking about something different? I just went with the GPU2 version because that's the one the site said "sorta" worked with ATI cards... I can't set anything in it though, the program doesn't let me get into any options, it just shuts down.

No, it's different. The GPU Tracker is a management thing for managing CPU/SMP and up to 8 GPUs.
http://fahtracker.com/

Ohhhh, I see... Shouldn't have told me x88x... Now I'mma coming to gobble up all your protein while you're on the throne...



... Wait... I mean... Uhhh... :facepalm:

O.k. so everything is running but something doesn't look right, My "gaming" desktop is a C2D E8400 that is running at 4ghz, the video card is a GTX 460 Fermi Hawk running at 900mhz... That system is putting out 3,4k PPD SMP and 10.9k PPD GPU... My 2 other systems are identical and running AMD Athlon II X4 600E's at 2.2ghz with R5670-PD512 video cards, they get 2.4k SMP and only like 600 PPD GPU?

The C2D is clocked almost twice as fast as the Athlon's but having a dual-core put out 1k more PPD than a Quad doesn't seem right... Then there's the video cards, I can understand the 460 doing what it is doing but the 5670's only doing 600 PPD seems off?

Does this stuff need to run for a few days before the PPD values are "accurate" or do I have something running wrong? I disabled the GPU3 boxes for both the ATI cards but it didn't seem to make much of a difference, also the ATI cards are barely breaking 40% GPU usage... Any ideas? Or should I just let it go as is?

to answer your question.

the nvidia client uses almost nothing from the cpu, while the ati client relies heavily on the gpu to assist it. turn off gpu folding on your 5670's and your cpu ppd will shoot up. experiment to find the best combo.

Make sure you set the the ATI cards to the right 'Force GPU Selection' option in the configuration options. 5670's should be R800; if that still shows really low numbers, try forcing to R700. The GPU clients don't work anywhere near as well on ATI cards as they do on nVidia cards, unfortunately, but 600 does seem really low. I think 5670's should put out at least a few thousand....maybe? I haven't run it on any ATI cards myself, so I'm going off rumors and hearsay. ;)

As for the CPUs, the C2D E8400 was a high-end dual-core CPU for its family, but the Athlon II X4 600E was a low-end quad-core during the same time period. The E8400 has three times the cache (four times the cache per core) and you have it running at almost twice the clock speed. I'm not surprised at all that it outperforms the 600E.

Wow, I forgot how hot air-cooled GPUs get. :eek: I couldn't fit my new 8800GTS (640) in my secondary system, it it's in my main system, tucked in between my two liquid-cooled GTX260's...and it is a full 30C hotter than both of them! I do not like having something in my case that is more than 50C...much less more than 80C! :eek: At some point I'm going to pull it apart and see if my 8800GTX full-coverage block will fit it. If not, I think I might be picking up a universal GPU block.

As it turns out, some of my software is not so happy with GPUs that aren't hooked up to a monitor...so now I'm running three monitors, each on a separate GPU. :P (Yeah, only three. :( One of my 225BW's died again a few weeks ago. :( ) Right now it's only showing another ~3300ppd, but I'm thinking it should put out a bit more than that. Also, if I play my cards right I might be able to trade this card with a friend for a GTS250...we shall see...we shall see...

Yeah, I guess I'll just have to play around with this, I know I could OC the X4's to get more out of them but that kinda defeats the purpose of buying 45w X4's to begin with... Ironically enough though the C2D is up to 4k PPD after running overnight while the X4's are sitting at about 2.5k... Still seems a little strange to me.

As far as the GPU's go I'm thinking there is nothing I can really do, turning the GPU's off entirely is making a difference though, I haven't had it running long enough to see if there is an improvement in running CPU only but so far the CPU running alone is almost matching the other system with both running.

The more I look at it and the more I read the less I'm inclined to believe that 5670's aren't capable of churning out some half decent numbers, for the PPD to be so low there must be something wrong, I'm guessing I'll have to wait for a revision in ATI support before I see them perform since any changes I make to the GPU settings only ever translate into a 100 point difference at most... Also the GPU usage seems really low, most of the time it bounces around the 30-40% range which leads me to believe the client isn't making proper use of the GPU.



Just a little update, I tried using R600 with GPU3 disabled and my GPU usage is now up to a solid 95%... A definite improvement on usage, will have to wait and see what that translates into in terms of PPD, either way TBCS has another 20k PPD. :banana:

On the X4 systems running GPU clients as well, try limiting the SMP client to 3 cores. That might actually boost your SMP numbers.

Well there seems to be some sort of issue with my ATI cards, as mentioned before I got them to run at 95% usage but it didn't really do much to boost my PPD and when I stopped GPU folding my GPU usage stayed at 95% and wouldn't drop back down.

I dunno, something is weird with these cards I'm just gonna stick with CPU folding for the time being. :neutral:

Will a SLI setup beat 2 individual cards folding?

Currently I have my GTX 260's folding and getting 6-7k PPD each. I complete a WU in 1h45min on each. So would they complete a WU in like 45min if configured for SLI?

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Originally Posted by Fuganater

Will a SLI setup beat 2 individual cards folding?

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No. For folding, you get better performance dropping the cards out of SLI and running individually. This is because the scaling in SLI is not actually 100%, so you have wasted potential. Actually, I'm not sure you can even run the F@H client on an SLI config

Afaik, SLI folding isn't possible at the moment - I could be wrong but I've definitely read somewhere that it doesn't work - you'd get the same or better performance from two GPU clients anyway I'd imagine.

As for the CPU folding this, definitely limit the multi processor folding to cores-1 cores (ie 3 on a quad, 2 on a 3-core) otherwise you end up with a CPU constantly stopping folding every time the GPU folding client asks for something - keeping a core free will allow the GPU clients to run flat out along with an SMP client...

I tried 3core+GPU, 4core+GPU, CPU Only and GPU Only (with various different configs)... So far CPU only folding is getting me the highest PPD at 4.1k... Any time I use the GPU it doesn't seem to matter what I do, the CPU PPD gets cut in half and the GPU only ever puts out a little over 1k max.

Seems to me there is some ridiculous overhead when running the GPU client on ATI cards (or maybe just these ATI cards) because the X4's are matching the C2D in PPD now that they don't have to worry about the GPU... I've tried every combination of settings for the GPU and when it is working it sits at 30-35% CPU and 90-95% GPU (when GPU folding is running on its own) which seems like it would work fine with the 3core+GPU setup but even with a core left open for the GPU folding the CPU PPD drops 50% (instead of the 25% I would expect from having 1 less core)... Basically if I fold with 3 cores alone, or fold with 3 cores + GPU the PPD is almost exactly the same... Something is definitely screwy with that.

Ahh well, at least my X4's sit at 22 degrees while folding as opposed to the 65 degrees the video cards are throwing into the room... Was hoping to contribute a lot more to the team but I guess I'll have to stick with my meager little offering for now. :D

So, if you had a GPU and a dual-core procy, would you be better off with the GPU and the CPU clients?

Well, my C2D desktop gets 4k+ from the CPU and 12k+ from the GPU with the SMP client using both cores for folding... The F@H clients seem to work perfect on Nvidia cards and there is next to no CPU overhead for GPU folding and as such my individual PPD stats didn't change much when I ran GPU or SMP on their own.

If you had an ATI card in a dual core system I guess it would kind of depend on a few different factors but from what I gather (and have read others say) the F@H client does consume a lot of CPU power to fold on an ATI GPU, I'm not really sure if my circumstance is any better or worse than everyone else trying to fold on ATI cards but if I am having problems on a quad core chip I imagine a dual core chip would be just as bad, even if it was clocked higher.

For comparison sake the 5670 I am using is roughly the same as an 8800/9800gt in terms of horsepower, a 9800gt gets somewhere around 5000ppd with next to no CPU usage... My 5670 gets 1k PPD with 30% CPU usage.

For folding I downclocked my C2D to 4ghz (was 4.3) so I could drop the voltage and the GTX460 is running at 900mhz (although it squeals like a pig, dunno if downclocking would help that though) and when running SMP and GPU clients I'm reporting around 16,000 PPD, I had originally setup the CPU and GPU clients without FAH Tracker and although I can't remember my exact numbers I do remember that running with the SMP client did get me double the points off the CPU, the GPU was relatively unchanged.

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Originally Posted by AmEv

So, if you had a GPU and a dual-core procy, would you be better off with the GPU and the CPU clients?

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Right. Keeping with the [cores]-1 rule of thumb, that would limit the CPU folding to a single core. IDK if there's any performance difference between the CPU client and the SMP client only using one core though....maybe you should test that?

Finally putting up real numbers! Here comes FUGA!!

This weekend is officially Modder Hunting Weekend for the TBCS team heh - according to this....

We'll overtake both Modders Inc and MODTHEBOX by the end of the weekend :D

Nice!

The good news: I bought a computer off Craigslist with a EVGA GTX 460 and an AMD Phenom II X4 945 for an excellent price, so expect my numbers to come up significantly as soon as I get it prepped for folding. (I'm expecting slightly less than double my current PPD, since I'm already running a Palit GTX 460 and an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T folding on 4 cores.)

The bad news: I've been having some weird behavior out of FAH GPU Tracker - when my GTX 460 has finished its last 5-6 work units, it claims it's still working until I manually stop the client and restart it. I confirmed this after looking through the log files - apparently it's having trouble communicating with the results server. May just be my connection going a bit sideways, but I'd rather play it safe. I think I'm going to take my machine offline for the next few hours to let it "rest" and see if that helps. If anyone has any suggestions, though, they are appreciated.

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Originally Posted by slaveofconvention

This weekend is officially Modder Hunting Weekend for the TBCS team heh - according to this....

We'll overtake both Modders Inc and MODTHEBOX by the end of the weekend :D

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heh... might have to go hijack my parents computers again... :whistler:

w00tz! I passed 1.5 million at some point this morning! :D

Also, I noticed that today we'll be passing Modders-Inc and Dell. :D

We have some competition now. AUFolding will pass us in 1.4 weeks. We need more folders!!!

Speaking of passing, Congrats on passing me as the #2 points provider Fuganater!

Thanks bud. I'm slowly starting to climb the ranks.

#1 Points Provider :D

still says your #9 on the team though :?

Stanford ranks by total points, EOC ranks by 24-hr average.

Ya x88x has 1.6 mil points over me... I'll get there 8)

So my GPU 0 and 1 PPD is dropping like crazy. I've changed nothing. It started at around 7488 PPD and now I'm down to 3648 on each. But when the WU starts its at the max which is 7488.

Thoughts?

sounds right. lol... you get "crap" units that really screw your folding for a week or 2, then go back to the high volume/fast jobs... its completely normal.

With this cold weather (In wisc) I REALLY want to oc my i7 back to 4.0 and take my 560 to it's former 975 mhz and plow through some wu's... but my parents are back home... :(

My GTS450 kicked back into action today, for all of 3 workunits - and now it's back to failing to start WU's - idn what's going on but I'm now fairly sure it ISN'T something I'm doing (or not doing)

You sure you didn't fry the card? I stopped doing GPU folding because I just didn't trust stressing the thing that much, besides the high pitch whine I was getting I really don't think GPU's are designed for 24/7 (or close) usage at 100%... I could be wrong though.