Official TBCS Folding Team

[diluzio91]

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.

[x88x]

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.

[x88x]

Wow, I forgot how hot air-cooled GPUs get. 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! 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. (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...

[RogueOpportunist]

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.

[x88x]

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

[RogueOpportunist]

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.

[Fuganater]

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?

[x88x]

Will a SLI setup beat 2 individual cards folding?

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

[slaveofconvention]

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...

[RogueOpportunist]

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.