Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

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JimF
Posts: 652
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 2:03 pm

Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by JimF »

I have a new MSI HD 7770, and can not get it to fold. This card is not intended for folding much anyway, since I have GTX 560s for that, but thought I would try it. It works fine on POEM, and so I know that the 12.4 drivers are working OK (the 12.6 drivers did not install OpenCL). Also, the V 7.1.52 client is downloading a Core 16 OK, so that much is good. But it gets stuck at the decompressing files stage, and never folds.

Will this be fixed with the new Core 16 v2.25?
bruce
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Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by bruce »

The HD 7770 has 640 shaders at 1000 MHz which, while not a super powerful GPU is not what I'd call slow either. It's one real disadvantage compared to the GTX560 is that it uses a lot of CPU time when it's folding so if you're planning on running a CPU or SMP client at the same time, it's less desirable.

It never starts folding because you must have OpenCL 1.1 or greater to use FAH. I'm really not sure why it wasn't installed. Did you download the drivers from ATI or some other source?
JimF
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Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by JimF »

Bruce,

I have OpenCL 1.2 installed with the 12.4 drivers now, it was the 12.6 drivers that I tried first that didn't work. (POEM uses OpenCL too, and it runs fine.)

I am beginning to suspect that it is because I have a GT 430 installed on the same motherboard. In the past, the FAHClient has had problems with dissimilar cards, as you know, but I had assumed that we were past that now. So I am going to try disabling the GT 430 and see if I can get the HD 7770 to fold all by itself. But I will have to wait several hours for a work unit to finish on the GT 430 before I can try it.

However, as you point out it would not be the most efficient way to fold in any case, so after that test I will just stay with my GTX 560 Ti on another PC whatever the results. And I will be adding some GTX 560s on another build later. They are now more efficient even than the GT 430 with the larger molecules (about 125 ppd/watt verses 80 ppd/watt from my latest measurements).
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Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by 7im »

Please post the output from "fahclient --lspci" and someone will help you set the cuda-index and opencl-index so mixed maker cards can fold.

Question, did you try to add the 7770 slot manually, or just run the installer again to do it automatically?
How to provide enough information to get helpful support
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JimF
Posts: 652
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 2:03 pm

Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by JimF »

7im,

I tried both setting the slot manually and automatically. But it is now set to select a slot automatically, and the GT 430 (the display card) is now folding slot 0 (but GPU 1, which is always confusing).
And the HD 7700 is now folding slot 1.

Code: Select all

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>fahclient --lspci
VendorID:DeviceID:Vendor Name:Description
0x1002:0x683d:Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI:AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
0x1002:0xaab0:Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI:High Definition Audio Controller
0x1033:0x0035:NEC Corporation:NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller
0x1033:0x0035:NEC Corporation:NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller
0x1033:0x00e0:NEC Corporation:Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
0x104c:0x8231:Texas Instruments:PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge
0x1095:0x3132:Silicon Image, Inc.:Silicon Image SiI 3132 SATALink Controller
0x10de:0x0bea:NVIDIA Corporation:High Definition Audio Controller
0x10de:0x0de1:NVIDIA Corporation:GF108 [GeForce GT 430]
0x11ab:0x6121:Marvell Technology Group Ltd.:Generic Marvell 61xx RAID Controller

0x1969:0x1026:Atheros Communications Inc.:Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller
0x8086:0x244e:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) 82801 PCI Bridge - 244E0x8086:0x2e20:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) 4 Series Chipset Processor to I/O Controller - 2E20
0x8086:0x2e21:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port- 2E21
0x8086:0x2e29:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port- 2E29
0x8086:0x3a16:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10R LPC Interface Controller - 3A16
0x8086:0x3a22:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller
0x8086:0x3a30:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family SMBus Controller - 3A30
0x8086:0x3a34:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A34
0x8086:0x3a35:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A35
0x8086:0x3a36:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A36
0x8086:0x3a37:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A37
0x8086:0x3a38:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A38
0x8086:0x3a39:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 3A39
0x8086:0x3a3a:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Enhanced Host Controller - 3A3A
0x8086:0x3a3c:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family USB Enhanced Host Controller - 3A3C
0x8086:0x3a3e:Intel Corporation:High Definition Audio Controller
0x8086:0x3a40:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family PCI Express Root Port 1 -3A40
0x8086:0x3a44:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family PCI Express Root Port 3 -3A44
0x8086:0x3a48:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family PCI Express Root Port 5 -3A48
0x8086:0x3a4a:Intel Corporation:Intel(R) ICH10 Family PCI Express Root Port 6 -3A4A

C:\Windows\system32>
JimF
Posts: 652
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 2:03 pm

Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by JimF »

I think the question is answered, for me. I disabled the GT 430 and connected the monitor to the HD 7770, and it started folding right away.

But the interesting part is that I get 5374 ppd (p 11293), which is not too shabby. And the card draws only 52 watts from the plug (not accounting for power supply efficiency), for a respectable 103 ppd/watt. And the temperature is only at 52 C at 100% GPU usage.

But the downside is that it uses a full 50% of my CPU (that is, all of a single core of an E8400 at 3 GHz). So maybe the new core 16 that PG is working on will help that part out, but I think the card has promise. That is all I need for now, thanks for the input.
bruce
Posts: 20910
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: Radeon HD 7770 will not fold

Post by bruce »

Unfortunately my prediction is that the FahCore that is in development will not fix the high CPU issue. (I hope I'm wrong, but that's my prediction anyway.) The issue is very closely tied to how the drivers are written, not the FahCore. The code in the OpenCL FahCore provides a direct comparison between interfacting with NVidia drivers and ATI drivers and they perform very differently in terms of CPU.

As far as running mixed types of GPUs is concerned, it was so difficult in V6 that except for a couple of people, everybody I know concluded that it was impossible. V7 has fixed many of the problems that were present in V6's GPU support but (probably one) one very significant problem still remains. V6 and the FahCores were designed and tested exclusively on Windows. Both the V6 client and the FahCores use Microsoft's method of enumerating GPUs -- but to develop a client which is capable of supporting GPU folding on Linux and/or OS-X where Microsoft's method of enumerating GPUs isn't available, an Open standard needed to be adopted. If there is only one GPU, the first one always matches the first one by any other enumeration method, owever it there are several methods and you have several GPUs, it's very difficult to know whether the Cores will call them 1 and 2 and the Client will call them 2 and 1 and then to assign the proper index values. Of course if you have two GPUs, there's about a 50% chance it will work correctly. There's still an open bug ticket to fix it, but 7im can help you set the indices to work on your system.
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