OS choice

[martintfs]

I've just upgraded my GPU from a GTX1060 to a RTX2060 and my points have gone from about 600k ppd to 900ppd which I am happy about. I'm looking at putting my old card to full time use in a spare machine and would like some advice on OS choice.
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-N3050M with a soldered on Celeron processor which when I tried W10 on a few years ago was so slow to the point of being unusable so I considered using Linux but from what I have heard there are GPU driver issues with folding and with such a gutless CPU I think the GPU units would be more important The PC will be exclusively used for folding so it wont matter how unresponsive it is after setting it up. I have a little experience with Linux, I use mint on my laptop and would never go back to windows on that but my main PC is W10 (for gaming reasons). Server versions of Linux might be a bit beyond my skills but I would be willing to give it a go.

[bruce]

A relatively small amount of CPU resources to support data transfers between main RAM and the PCIe slot. Folding concurrently on the CPU can also be configured which will depend on the availability of CPU resources.

GPU drivers are available for either Linux or Windows but finding them and installing them on Linux is a bit more challenging than on Windows. Actual FAH performance is better on Linux, but it requires a higher level of guru knowledge.

If your W10 computer is used X hours a day for gaming, then it's going to be easy to get (24-x) hours of GPU folding .... and perhaps 24 hrs of CPU folding. Personally, I've found that dual-booting is a waste of time. Pick one and make it work for you.

[foldy]

I run FAH on GPU with Linux docker images nvidia/opencl-ubuntu-devel18.04 without issues.

GA-N3050M has only PCI Express slot running at pcie gen2 x1. So you must use Linux as Windows bottlenecks too much on pcie bandwidth for FAH.

Debian / Mint / Ubuntu / Redhat / Centos / Fedora
https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/

[martintfs]

The main PC is already folding 24-x hrs anyway, I was looking to use my old GPU in the old PC which is just sitting there gathering dust.

[bruce]

S GTX1060 is still a respective GPU. Fire it up ... or find a friend who will use it for FAH.

[Asgaroth]

If you do fancy giving linux a go, I documented an arch installation in the forums here

[HaloJones]

I use Linux Mint on a couple of machines that simply fold 24/7. Works really well and reliably (touch wood).

There are plenty of guides for the install which is not as simple as it might be for FAH. The linux bit is simple and the install will correctly interpret your hardware. You will have to install Nvidia drivers yourself and then install FAH.

[gordonbb]

Definitely Linux will be required.

It can be a little tricky to get running at first but once it does it’s pretty much set it and forget it.

I like Ubuntu 18.0.4 and have that running on 6 systems. Here’s my guide on how to get it running.

I’ve run a RTX 2070 on an old 2.8GHz AMD Athlon II x64 with 2GB on DDR3 in a PCIe2 x16 Slot with no noticeable degradation compared to the same GPU in more modern systems.

It should work in that motherboard. The CPU speed and/or the lack of PCIe lanes might bottleneck the GPU but I’d guess with a 1060 you could still get better than 90% of its performance. I’m still running 3 1060s and they all get around 400-500kPPD.

And there lots of people here who’d be happy to help if you get stuck.

[nivedita]

Regarding linux and Nvidia, I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this problem before: I found that my GPU was working at only around 125-140W (GPU is Titan V with nominal TDP of 250W) and clock speed of only 1350MHz. I have to run nvidia-smi -cc 1 at startup to allow FAH to get the higher clock speeds and full power usage. The card also allows boosting power limit to 300W but I haven't noticed significant difference in clock speeds from doing that, so only running at default of 250W.

[HaloJones]

Regarding linux and Nvidia, I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this problem before: I found that my GPU was working at only around 125-140W (GPU is Titan V with nominal TDP of 250W) and clock speed of only 1350MHz. I have to run nvidia-smi -cc 1 at startup to allow FAH to get the higher clock speeds and full power usage. The card also allows boosting power limit to 300W but I haven't noticed significant difference in clock speeds from doing that, so only running at default of 250W.

Can't say I've ever tried that particular setting on nvidia-smi. What does it do?

For me, I've set up coolbits and have a startup script that calls nvidia-settings and nvidia-smi

sudo nvidia-smi -i 0 -pl 200
sudo nvidia-smi -i 1 -pl 275
nvidia-settings -c :0 -a '[gpu:0]/GPUMemoryTransferRateOffset[3]=600'
nvidia-settings -c :0 -a '[gpu:0]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[3]=125'
nvidia-settings -c :0 -a '[gpu:1]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[3]=225'

this sets a higher power limit on the two cards (1070 and TitanX respectively), overclocks the memory on the 1070 and overclocks the cores on both cards.

[ccgllc]

I just spent that past two days fooling around with Linux Mint. Did a reinstall and had FAH up and running in under an hour now that I know what I'm doing:

1) Download Mint (https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php) and burn to a usb stick
2) Boot USB on the system of choice (I had an ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard with a dual core Pentium, 8gb of memory, a spare 500GB drive, and (6) Nvidia 1070ti GPU cards)
3) Click the install button when it appears. Go with most of the defaults, except make sure you select the button next to "Install proprietary drivers" (missed that the first time). Suggest selecting the LVM mode of install so you can make snapshots later.
4) Reboot, login, tweak your network address if you care, apply updates, etc. Probably want to use the software management screen to install openssh if you want to be able to remotely login in. (Just search and click).
5) Web over to https://foldingathome.org from the machine and click on each of the three programs, one at a time. The install manager will be automatically invoked.
6) If you selected LVM mode, now is a good time to take a snapshot.
7) Reboot
8) SSH in, edit /etc/fahclient/
8a) Presuming this is an old GPU mining machine with a small cpu, set <cpu v='false'/>, make sure the gpu setting is true.
8b) Modify and replicate the slot lines - one for each GPU: <slot id='0' type='GPU'/>, <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>, etc.
9) service FAHClient stop
10) apt-get install ocl-icd-libopencl1 ocl-icd-opencl-dev
11) Manually start: "FAHClient" and make sure all looks well
12) Optionally go to the system, login, and web over to https://client.foldingathome.org and review your good work!
13) Presuming all your GPUs show up, be patient - takes awhile to get initial work.

[nivedita]

Regarding linux and Nvidia, I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this problem before: I found that my GPU was working at only around 125-140W (GPU is Titan V with nominal TDP of 250W) and clock speed of only 1350MHz. I have to run nvidia-smi -cc 1 at startup to allow FAH to get the higher clock speeds and full power usage. The card also allows boosting power limit to 300W but I haven't noticed significant difference in clock speeds from doing that, so only running at default of 250W.

Can't say I've ever tried that particular setting on nvidia-smi. What does it do?

-cc Overrides or restores default CUDA clocks Available arguments are 0|RESTORE_DEFAULT or 1|OVERRIDE.

according to the man page. Without that my card refuses to clock higher than 1350MHz for FAH. After I did that it's clocking up to 1700-1800MHz.

[foldinghomealone2]

The main PC is already folding 24-x hrs anyway, I was looking to use my old GPU in the old PC which is just sitting there gathering dust.

Why don't you put the 1060 in your main PC?