FX 3700 (G92) Folding with Beta [flag]

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Kebast
Posts: 386
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2015 5:21 pm

FX 3700 (G92) Folding with Beta [flag]

Post by Kebast »

I recently joined this project and have some questions concerning old hardware. I have an ATI R7 260x that's folding away in my main machine, but have a couple older cards laying around. I put my Quadro FX 3700 in a spare machine and cranked up FAH. At first nothing, but then I read about the beta flag. Sure enough, I set that flag for the G92 card and it started working away. Getting around 5k PPD. Here are my questions:

1. The G92 consumes about 80 watts. Is the 5k PPD it's producing a worthwhile effort? Power is cheap in my parts (0.09/KW), but still are there better options?

2. I read that jobs for this card are going away, is this true? When?

3. I'm running this on a AMD FX-6300 CPU, would I be better off just letting the CPU work? I don't think so, assuming I have jobs the card can run, but it's a close call I guess.

4. I've not tried yet, but I'd like to put this in the same rig the R7 260x is in. Any issues with running GPUs from ATI and NV on the same system? This machine would likely be WIndows 7 (until 10 comes for me), but I have an Ubuntu 14.04 up and going too.

That's about it. I'm folding under the same user name if that helps at all.
Last edited by Kebast on Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Joe_H
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Re: FX 3700 (G92) Folding with Beta

Post by Joe_H »

Welcome to the folding support forum.

I'll try to answer what I can of the questions you asked.

1. If you are only going for points, there are more recent cards that will produce more for a similar power usage. But that has its own cost if you need to purchase it. From the standpoint of contributing to finishing a group of older projects, your card and others of similar vintage are helpful.

2. The core these projects use has been announced as end of life, and no new projects will be started using that core. However from the time some of these projects start and reach completion can take several years. So, yes eventually the assignments for these projects will end but we don't have any specific date to give you.

Just also want to mention that this generation of video cards used to be assigned to an even older group of projects using an earlier GPU folding core. Those projects ended last year about this time, about 2 years after they were announced as nearing end of life.

3. Not sure how much your CPU can produce on its own, but with these older Core_15 WU's you can assign all CPU cores to CPU folding if you do enable it. Unlike newer GPU cores, this one uses a fairly small amount of CPU processing and a core does not need to be reserved for GPU processing much of the time.

4. It is possible to run GPU's from ATI and nVidia on the same system, but it is not always trouble free. Sometimes the folding client gets the index values backwards, and tries to run work for one GPU on the other and vice versa. If you do decide to try this, complete any work and then completely uninstall the folding client including data files and reinstall after both GPU's are installed along with their drivers will give you the best chance to avoid this problem.

The client may still get the indexes backwards, there are a couple of guides for how to manually set them on the forum.

This should work on Windows 7, however I have read that some of the older cards might not get driver support in 10. This card is too old to use for GPU folding on a Linux installation.
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Kebast
Posts: 386
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2015 5:21 pm

Re: FX 3700 (G92) Folding with Beta [flag]

Post by Kebast »

Thanks for the info! Especially #3. I've been reserving a thread for it, so I'll try just setting the CPU to max cores. I get around 13k PPD from the CPU alone, stock speeds. Also glad to know this card won't work in Linux, I may grab a cheap 750ti for that machine. My plan is a new install of Win 7, using a gently overclocked FX-6300, R7 260x, and the Quadro 3700. This would be my gaming rig, which just means it will be folding 99.5% of the time :).
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Kebast
Posts: 386
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2015 5:21 pm

Re: FX 3700 (G92) Folding with Beta [flag]

Post by Kebast »

Wow, that Quadro 3700 card is incredibly hot. I came home to find the core at 92 C. Gotta get better case fans before I fire it up again!
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