GPU crunching..

[Bok]

Had to replae a graphics card over the weekend and picked up a fairly cheap ($100) 9800GT.

Thought I'd try it out on GPUgrid and it's working out very nicely. It's in a quadcore machine running the latest alpha Boinc 6.3.21 and there are 4 instances of MindModelling@Home running on the cpu's and a single GPUGrid running on the card (using very little cpu itself).

Nice points as well, I've got 12,000 in 3 days from this card alone... Looks like IB is going to destroy me with his GX280 though

Bok

[IronBits]

[Digital Parasite]

Nice. Now if only CUDA would be ported to ATI...

[vaughan]

Bok I get approx 4000 ppd from my 8800 GT / 9800 GT GPUs. The GTX260 gets about 5000-5500 ppd. Not sure why it varies.

Under 32bit Windows XP you can adjust the GPU fan speed / card temps using Ntune. However, this app just locks up and won't run on my 64bit Win XP boxen.

Don't have any ATI cards on Folding so cannot compare. I believe they don't get as many points per day. I think they have to tweak the GPU2 application some more to help the ATI cards.

[Paratima]

Hey Bok or Ironbits,

I've got 2 XP boxen with GeForce 8500 GT boards, so I tried running GPUGRID on one of them. After 1 hour, the task showed 6 hours left to run. After 3 hours, it showed 15 hours left to run. The time-to-complete just kept incrementing, so I killed the stupid thing.

Also, when I had it set to run only with no applications, it wouldn't run at all. Running with applications made the screen really jumpy.

I used the latest BOINC manager, 6.6.20. Do you think I should try a different manager or is this thing just not ready for prime time? I have no dedicated crunchers at the moment, so it has to run on machines doing real-world work. If it's too Beta, which is what it looks like on the GPUGRID forum, I'll just leave it off and try again in a year or so. Actually, the feeling I get from that forum is Alpha. Comments?

[Bok]

I think the 8500GT might be very borderline on whether it could complete a task within time anyway. I very much doubt you could use the system as well as it is probably using all of it's GPU memory on the task and that's why the screen is slow to update.

I still requires cputime to run as well as the gputime, so perhaps that's why it didn't work when no applications were selected, though I'm guessing there.

I would say it's definitely beta, not alpha. I've had very few problems with it in the last few months.

Bok

[Paratima]

Hey, that's great! Thanks, Bok. Makes the decision easy.

Can't see spending a wad on a mega-vid card as the 8500 is plenty fast to do everything I need to do in Photoshop. I work with stills, not movies. I don't do games. I watch movies on my TV, not my PC. Think I'll leave stuff just the way it is.

[PCZ]

I have loaded this up on one box.
Doesn't seem to be making very good use of the VC though.

Client is working but the temp of the VC is the same as idle.
There isn't any of the laggy desktop you normally get with GPU clients either.

Haven't tried to run in XP yet im using W7 with the latest drivers 185.81.

Thought it might be a good side project for my desktop machines with NV cards installed.

How long should these WU's take to crunch on an 8800GT ?
Is the low utilisation of the VC normal ?

[IronBits]

Finally got an additional HDMI monitor hooked up to the 2nd port of the GTX 295.
Took a bit of patience, but I finally see 2 CUDA devices crunching in Boinc on GPUGRID.
Vista 64 with the newest non-beta drivers nVidia has.