Checking in after an upgrade

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everyman
Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:15 am
Hardware configuration: Toshiba X205-SLi1 using nVidia CUDA drivers version 177.35

Checking in after an upgrade

Post by everyman »

For a very long time time (at least a year, I am sure) I have been folding anonymously. My system has a core i5 2500 in it and I did my usual on and off style of folding. My video card was a gt520 and my 250w power supply was not strong enough to drive it for folding. In late November I upgraded to a new PSU and an AMD 7950. I folded a few WU's and played many games, but then the GPU died and had to be RMA'ed. After I got the card back around New Years I decided that I would look up my old passkey and see what my new PPD was doing for my old ranking. Bear in mind that I am a part time folder. It's rare my GPU folds more than 8 hours a day and while my CPU folds almost 24/7 it's only on 2 cores. So I am a long way from my max 75K PPD.

In December my ranking was in the 120,000 range. After less than a month it's at 68,762 as of this writing. Now I don't fold for points, but if I did I would most likely kill my CPU slots and add a second GPU. Why? Points Per Watt. My GPU uses 150 Watts per Hour for 70,000 PPD and CPU uses 125 Watts per Hour for 5,000 PPD.

So are any of you swapping your CPU slots for GPU slots to get the most out your power bills?

If so is this creating a back log of CPU WU's?

If not, how much power would you need to draw before you considered backing off of WU's for your device with the lowest PPW?
"In Theory there is no difference between Theory and Practice. In Practice there is."
billford
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Re: Checking in after an upgrade

Post by billford »

everyman wrote:Why? Points Per Watt. My GPU uses 150 Watts per Hour for 70,000 PPD and CPU uses 125 Watts per Hour for 5,000 PPD.
That's only a valid comparison if the 125 watts (not watts per hour) is the extra that the CPU consumes when it's folding compared to when it's not, as if the CPU (and the rest of the computer) isn't on then the GPU isn't folding either.
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Zagen30
Posts: 823
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 12:45 am
Hardware configuration: Core i7 3770K @3.5 GHz (not folding), 8 GB DDR3 @2133 MHz, 2xGTX 780 @1215 MHz, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit running 7.3.6 w/ 1xSMP, 2xGPU

4P E5-4650 @3.1 GHz, 64 GB DDR3 @1333MHz, Ubuntu Desktop 13.10 64-bit

Re: Checking in after an upgrade

Post by Zagen30 »

When I added a second 780 to my main rig, I stopped folding on its 3770k. At that point the 20k PPD it could do on the highest-scoring WUs paled in comparison to the 170k or so from each 780, to say nothing of the 4P-4650 Intel rig I have going, which usually earns around 930k. The temps would have also gotten a bit out of hand; at one point I tried seeing what a 6-thread CPU slot running a Linux VM would do alongside the two 780s, and I think the CPU temps were in the high 80s. This is with a pretty nice air cooler, BTW.

I don't know how much of a backlog is being caused by people abandoning CPU folding for GPU folding. According to the official stats, there's around 20k active core 17-capable GPUs to 140k active CPUs. From a recent blog post by Dr. Pande, it was noted that they often negotiate corporate donations of server time, and that until recently that was usually all CPU donations. I'm guessing this helps with the load of CPU projects, though it appears to create a sort of boom-or-bust cycle at times.

It will be interesting to see what happens with GPU projects in the near future. Core 17's major advancement over cores 15 and 16 is that it can run the same calculations that the CPU cores have been running for a while now. They can't directly port existing CPU projects to run on core 17, but they might start shifting the ratio of new CPU to GPU projects.
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7im
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Re: Checking in after an upgrade

Post by 7im »

No way to know. With CPUs getting more and more cores, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc. maybe the CPU WUs aren't getting backed up at all by the addition of GPUs. Not saying there is or is not a backlog, but fah can always use more power, of both types.

GPU has me folding on 1 fewer core per GPU, but I still fold on all the CPUs.
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