The Tom's Hardware F@H Team Thread (Team 40051)

[AliusBU]

I'm waiting for UPS to show up with my 1080. I'm hoping it can run with my 970 folding.

At one point I was running a GT 430 (in a x1 slot with a questionable ribbon cable adapter I got on ebay...) alongside my 650 Ti and that worked ok. Hopefully Pascal and Maxwell play as nice as Kepler and Fermi did *fingers crossed* Edit: If your concern was less about drivers and more about power, just make sure you've got enough 12V amps for both of them running at full tilt.

Well I've had to cease on the folding for now - the competition seemed too much for my i7 4790k and it now won't stay stable when running all 4 cores :-(

Further investigation seems to show that possibly my MB has been providing it with too much voltage, as I never set it manually and left it to its own devices. I suppose i'll have to make do with just 3 cores until I can afford to replace it 🙁

Sad times. On a positive note though, I managed to post the highest numbers i've ever done 🙂

Maybe i'll save up and upgrade to a dual socket Xeon E5 setup in the future. 72 threads anyone?

Yowsa, that would be something, alright! Sorry to hear about your poor Devil's Canyon chip 🙁

 

[lilcinw]

I purchased a 1080 the day the race started and just threw it in below my 970. It ran just fine. Now that the race is over it is time to reconfigure my setup and see what my new toy can do. 😀

 

[MusenMouse]

They have passed us now....salt....wounds and all that.

Paddle those mods, I need cheering up :lol:

Yes, we were promised either victory or mod paddling! Where is Titillating with those giant hammers?

 

[Titillating]

I think you all got paddled badly enough by AT :lol:

 

[TechyInAZ]

You all get a second chance. Next time if you loose, you'll get a whippin. 😛

 

[EXT64]

So now we have to lose on purpose again to see the mouse get a paddlin'?!? Boo! 🙁

 

[weberdarren97]

I'm sorry I couldn't be more useful... Running all my rigs at once just kept blowing the house breakers.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

I'm sorry I couldn't be more useful... Running all my rigs at once just kept blowing the house breakers.

That's pretty bad - or conversely pretty impressive - that your next upgrade is going to be to upgrade the electrical wiring in your house. Just run some 2-gauge from the fuse box to the outlet, drop a 50A breaker in there and call it a day... lol.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Congrats to AT but at least we were first of the losers. 🙁

On the upside we have had a wonderful boost in contributors as can be seen in the leader-board.

 

[10esseetony]

I'm sorry I couldn't be more useful... Running all my rigs at once just kept blowing the house breakers.

I'm currently remodeling a house in my spare time that I intend to move into when completed. And everywhere that I can imagine a computer might someday sit, I'm installing a 20amp 240volt outlet, lol. (Along with cat5 outlets of course.) The rest of the room is fed from that outlet, 20A-120v leg 'A' going to two walls and 20A-120v leg 'b' going to the other two walls and light. Hopefully I can quit worrying about overloaded circuits myself. Maybe.

The plan is to have the dedicated crunchers in the garage during warm weather, then spread throughout the bedrooms and living room in winter for heat.

 

[JigoroKano]

I've noticed that F@H says my CUDA is 5.2. I see on the website they have an 8.0 CUDA package. Is it worth it to install the newer version? Any performance gain from doing so? Will I screw anything up?

 

[Unolocogringo]

I've noticed that F@H says my CUDA is 5.2. I see on the website they have an 8.0 CUDA package. Is it worth it to install the newer version? Any performance gain from doing so? Will I screw anything up?

You are probably running an older driver.
The best driver for 400-700 series cards is the 361.?? driver.
The best for 1000 series cards is 368 0r 372 driver series.
The 375+series breaks folding.

 

[Mousemonkey]

I've noticed that F@H says my CUDA is 5.2. I see on the website they have an 8.0 CUDA package. Is it worth it to install the newer version? Any performance gain from doing so? Will I screw anything up?

Unsure, are you running a Mac?

 

[JigoroKano]

Whats the best driver for the 900 series?

 

[JigoroKano]

I've noticed that F@H says my CUDA is 5.2. I see on the website they have an 8.0 CUDA package. Is it worth it to install the newer version? Any performance gain from doing so? Will I screw anything up?

Unsure, are you running a Mac?

This machine is not a mac. (win 10)

 

[Mousemonkey]

I've noticed that F@H says my CUDA is 5.2. I see on the website they have an 8.0 CUDA package. Is it worth it to install the newer version? Any performance gain from doing so? Will I screw anything up?

Unsure, are you running a Mac?

This machine is not a mac. (win 10)

The only 8.0 CUDA package I can see on the Nvidia site is for the Mac OS and as far as drivers go I'm still using the 361.75 driver for my 900 series cards.

 

[warmon6]

Well even though the competition is over, looks were starting to level out around the 25M to 30M PPD mark. Certainly a nice big boost from where we were just a month ago (about 10M to 15M PPD)

 

[AliusBU]

Well now that the whoopin' is complete, I would love some advice if anyone has already crunched the numbers and found the right answer, so that I can hopefully contribute even more next time. Normally in the winter I've been using my 2x R9 290 (stock clocked or they nuke themselves with heat when folding, unfortunately) and I've skipped on CPU folding, figuring it wouldn't contribute that much extra. Overall,it certainly doesn't add much, but when going all out and turning on everything shy of my smartphone to fold on, I'd like to squeeze as much juice as I can. Right now I am running my 4770K (turbo set to 4GHz for all cores but haven't experimented past that) on smp:4, figuring one physical core (2 threads) per GPU. Is that the right metric to go by? Is one thread per GPU enough to not hold them back but still eek out some more CPU PPD? I'm not really sure how I would benchmark it other than trying it for a day or two, so I didn't want to mess around too much during the competition, and just left it alone. Heck, I'm not even sure reserving some CPU for the GPU cores is even strictly necessary or boosts the GPU PPD any more than, say, bumping the priority of fahcore_21 over fahcore_a4, etc. Any guidance and/or anecdotal experience would be appreciated!

 

[JigoroKano]

When I added my CPU the extra heat from the CPU made the GPU go slower so I lost more points than I gained with the CPU...Buuut I had both very much overclocked (970 from 1116 to 1492, and the 4790k from 4.0 to 4.5ghz). I wonder what it would all be like at stock speeds?

Tonight my 1080 should be up and running, I'm hoping I can make 1080 and 970 both fold simultaneously. Probably going to leave the CPU out of it.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

When I added my CPU the extra heat from the CPU made the GPU go slower so I lost more points than I gained with the CPU...Buuut I had both very much overclocked (970 from 1116 to 1492, and the 4790k from 4.0 to 4.5ghz). I wonder what it would all be like at stock speeds?

Tonight my 1080 should be up and running, I'm hoping I can make 1080 and 970 both fold simultaneously. Probably going to leave the CPU out of it.

I actually did much the same thing - I was running both GPUs and 6 cores (out of 8) and it seemed like I was running fewer points. So - I disabled the CPU and just let the GPU fold away. Seems to actually be doing better that way.

 

[Unolocogringo]

My experience has been, if running lower end cards you can fold with the CPU also.
Higher end cards or dual cards , run GPU only.

 

[warmon6]

My experience has been, if running lower end cards you can fold with the CPU also.
Higher end cards or dual cards , run GPU only.

same here.

My theory is that because a higher end gpu can complete work faster, It need more resources from the cpu to keep the data flowing.

Also the one thing i've learned from folding on my 980ti is that you might as well use gpu only and overclock it. Higher end cards are already pretty fast and overclocking them can give a far bigger boost on points than folding gpu and cpu combined.

Heck during the competition, if i just using my desktop for some thing, my TPF would only increase by a few seconds but my "PPD estimate" would jump by 30k-60k ppd. So every second counts.


Also I haven't tried folding on the graphic side of my APU (7850k) and with over-clocking...... maybe i should experiment with it a bit later...

 

[JigoroKano]

OK New 1080 is in alongside the 970. No CPU folding, stock clocking, the control thing says I'm doing a million a day. I should finally be a decent producer for the team, I wish it had all come together prior to the competition

 

[beanoslim]

Well now that the whoopin' is complete, I would love some advice if anyone has already crunched the numbers and found the right answer, so that I can hopefully contribute even more next time. Normally in the winter I've been using my 2x R9 290 (stock clocked or they nuke themselves with heat when folding, unfortunately) and I've skipped on CPU folding, figuring it wouldn't contribute that much extra. Overall,it certainly doesn't add much, but when going all out and turning on everything shy of my smartphone to fold on, I'd like to squeeze as much juice as I can. Right now I am running my 4770K (turbo set to 4GHz for all cores but haven't experimented past that) on smp:4, figuring one physical core (2 threads) per GPU. Is that the right metric to go by? Is one thread per GPU enough to not hold them back but still eek out some more CPU PPD? I'm not really sure how I would benchmark it other than trying it for a day or two, so I didn't want to mess around too much during the competition, and just left it alone. Heck, I'm not even sure reserving some CPU for the GPU cores is even strictly necessary or boosts the GPU PPD any more than, say, bumping the priority of fahcore_21 over fahcore_a4, etc. Any guidance and/or anecdotal experience would be appreciated!

Run one card with core temp running and check the load on the cpu.

Then add the next card and check the load on the cpu.

That should tell you the work required by the cpu while folding.

I have an 8 core 8350 and I never fold with it, just not worth the xtra heat and hassle.

Also with the cpu folding I am more likely to experience slow downs during day to day use of pc.

 

[AliusBU]

Thanks for the insights everyone! And congrats on the new 1080 JigoroKano, way to fold!