GTX460 768 vs 1gb comparison

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rick5127

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I just finished testing the difference between a 768 card and a 1gb card for folding. It was a bit lengthy for a post so I put it in an article form on my website. For anyone interested see this link
 
Interesting article. I want to mention a sentence you're probably aware of that needs editing. In the article it states, "Also the 768 has 24 ROP's vs 24 for the 768 card," which should read "the 1GB has 32 ROP's vs 24 for the 768 card."

More importantly, you didn't state the production difference between the two GTX 460 versions. I know you pointed out that you'll be monitoring the two cards and was wondering what preliminary results you've observed so far? It shouldn't take too long to see any significant (or not) TPF differences from a few WUs. I read somewhere there is a small variance with certain WUs which might become more relevant with future units. Did you see this?
 
Like Apollo, I didn't see any production numbers I was hoping for. I've heard from a few different people that the 1GB versions produce slightly PPD but those reports have been few and far between so I don't know how credible this is.
 
Yah sorry about the edit. Don't know how I missed the ROP thingy. geesh

I will go look at the article again I thought I had mentioned production. Bottom line is there is almost no difference at least in the 6806 wu's I have been folding as of late. If there is a difference I sure can't see it yet.

Been using HFM to monitor and the numbers have been pretty steady. One thing, these 6806 and the 6811 wu's both vary during processing. They speed up and slow down all the time during their running. One time they might take 1:56 per unit then later they can slow down to as much as 4 minutes per unit. So it is a little hard to keep a handle on.

My impression is that both cards are folding at about the same level.
 
Yah I mentioned in the article that I didn't see much if any difference in the two cards. I didn't list actual numbers as I thought that would be sufficient. However both cards are pumping out right at 10k ppd on a 6806 wu at stock settings. This number goes up and down all during the processing but that is a pretty good estimate of its final rate. If anything I think the 768 card MIGHT be a hair faster. Course the 768 is clocked just a hair faster at stock too.
 
Of course an even better number could be gotten if I shut down one of the cards and just fold 6806's on it for a week, then do the same on the other card. But I don't really want to lose all the production I would miss by doing so.
 
It's OK, if you didn't see a difference at all between the two then there's no reason to make additional changes to the article. I saw someone posting about a small difference but can't recall how much and which WU. This was over a month ago.
 
Well actually I thought there would be a difference. I thought maybe those extra ROP's on the 1gb card might help, maybe even the bandwidth but I sure don't see it.

I added the numbers to the article.

Trouble with numbers is one guy is gonna look at HFM and see it is folding at 12K and another is gonna see it is folding at 6K and both think they have the correct number.

Realistically I posted a number I could hang my hat on. Yah it folds a little over that for a bit... then it folds a little under that for a bit. I figure that 10K number is pretty close to being accurate.

I might look at a weeks worth of logs and see if I can see any difference.
 
Ok I took a look at the logs. I looked at the last 9 work units for both cards which were all 6806's and the Palit 1gb card turned out to be faster. In 29 hours of folding the difference in the two cards was 6 minutes. Since they didn't fold the exact same wu I feel this 6 minutes could be in the variation between work units. So I stand by my earlier statement. There is little to no difference between a 768 and a 1gb GTX460 for folding.
 
rick5127 said:
There is little to no difference between a 768 and a 1gb GTX460 for folding.
Click to expand...

AT reported this same thing when the cards first came out, I guess you missed it?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/16
23754.png
 
Dang thanks for the link! I had no idea anyone did folding benchmarks. Thanks again.

And your right... I missed it.

Rick
 
NP ;)
AT is the only site I see that does them, but I'm sure there are others.
 
But hey thanks for bringing up the subject. I didn't know the Anandtech data either and just picked up a 768MB card just for folding....so it's good to know I didn't give up anything really.
 
Thanks guys. Used to be you could never find any folding benchmarks. I guess we are finally making an impact huh. Well this is great as I don't need to do them any more. Will still do the power stuff though as it is near and dear to my heart.

Will save me bunches of time too. Let the guys that get paid for this stuff do it. hehe. I only do it to see for myself and to help others in their folding info.
 
rick5127 said:
Thanks guys. Used to be you could never find any folding benchmarks. I guess we are finally making an impact huh. Well this is great as I don't need to do them any more. Will still do the power stuff though as it is near and dear to my heart.

Will save me bunches of time too. Let the guys that get paid for this stuff do it. hehe. I only do it to see for myself and to help others in their folding info.
Click to expand...
Actually, it is very valuable to have a 'neutral party' perform benchmarks. It is always appreciated to have more folders performing them because we'll see a wider range of results. There are many cards out there and many WUs, many configurations, etc. GPU variations are endless, and it would be great to have as many results as possible from my perspective.
 
Yah I understand your thing about "neutral party", I too never know who or whom to trust. And I enjoy doing it in the end so its kind of fun for me.

Besides when I am done I know for sure.
 
To further confuse matters: 1GB 460 "SE"

I dont know if this is any help here, but i accidentally bought an "SE" version of 460 1GB, and it seems to be pretty decent as well It, can fold like that for days with no trouble,
It seems possible that this version of the card does not have adjustable vcore, or maybe the MSI app can not adjust it.

LvsK7.jpg


It is a gigabyte one with the dual fans, nice and quiet.

heres a page that shows the differences.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/38178-nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-se-1gb-review-3.html
 
Yah I knew about the SE card. But it has a lot less shaders. I wasn't expecting that high of numbers though. That surprises me or was that just a momentary thing? I mean I have watched mine go up and down in numbers but even so that is a pretty high number. I did notice the overclocks. I just turned my clockes up to 880/900/1760 and they get around 12K max on mine on a 6806 wu. Points go up quite a bit on those 110188 or whatever the heck the number is though. Is it possible your folding one of those? Wait till you get a 6811. Those really crank up the heat in the card. Don't know whats in them but they really load the card down.

Oh and as far as voltage goes... did you go to settings and unlock the voltage controls? You can't touch voltages until you do it.

Still amazed that with less shaders that SE gets some good points.
 
no it is pretty steady, thats a 6806 At the speed that card comes at (a little overclocked) it hovers around 10k PPD all the time with what WUs i have got anyways. i got a few extra PPD with the overclock, it seems like it might be able to do more, but i havent done any careful tweaking yet. it is possible some of the things they did not cut out, and even left at the level of the 1GB version are what make the difference.

I am recieving a real 460 1GB, i will put it in this system for a while and do some real comparisons, Ill put them at the same speed, and with a bit of luck show them with the same WU. with SMP turned off (seems quite likely since the majority of my WU are 6806 anyways)

yeah i did do the unlock voltage thing, it is still greyed out, mind you i havent rebooted since i started that SMP WU
 
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Well that is strange. I wouldn't expect the SE to get about the same ppd as my 768 or 1gb since is has 48 less cores. I really don't understand that. I just did some numbers and at stock clocks both of my cards are at 10,750ppd.

Strange things going on here...
 
rick5127 said:
Well that is strange. I wouldn't expect the SE to get about the same ppd as my 768 or 1gb since is has 48 less cores. I really don't understand that. I just did some numbers and at stock clocks both of my cards are at 10,750ppd.
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IIRC, the GTX 470s are producing about 11-12K PPD now depending on frequency, and not very far from these results. It could just be the type of WUs in the field presently. Anything can change in the future.
 
On your voltage thing... it doesn't take effect until MSI Afterburner is restarted. Did you try that?
 
ARRRGGGGhhhh!!!

Found my 30 watts I was saving on my screen saver.

I was just doing some work on afterburner when I noticed my Palit card was downclocked to half speed or so. I THINK this might be 2d clocks. Anyways... nothing I do will make the Palit come out of it until reboot.

So while looking into that... I rebooted ... system came up fine, I starting folding on both cards... speeds just fine... then I let it go into screen saver. Brought it back out of screen saver and noticed the EVGA card had downclocked to half speed (405 core) during screen saver mode then came right back up when I awoke the screens. Sheehs... I should have thought of that when I was testing.

Oh well that means every time I went into screen saver the dang card was running at half speed. Now not sure what to think of the PPD numbers I posted above. Guess I will have to play with it a bit.

Meanwhile more importantly does anyone know of a way to wake that Palit card up out of 2D clocks. Seems the card just randomly goes to half speed (405 core) and then will not come out no matter what I do. Got any ideas... Afterburner will not make her come out.

I had the card overclocked but the temps were pretty good (61c max) so don't think that was causing it to go into 2d but could be. I just backed the timings way down and am now running it to see if she will downclock again. But so far she has run clean. It COULD very well be she didn't like the overclocking although I have no indications that overclocking bothered her.
 
Ok she has run a couple of hours at the slower speeds and no problems. I am bumping her back up now to verify that the overclocking is what is causing the downclocking.

This card makes me nervous. I really think the VRM's need more cooling. I looked at a french website that had some infrared cameras on the cards and it showed temps in the 90c+ range around the VRM's. My card has always shown under 62c at the sensor (not at the VRM's though) so I thought everything would be fine but now I am thinking the VRM's are running on the ragged edge here.

So if the speed bumping verifys that the card can't take it then I am at the point of deciding whether to keep the card and adding my own cooling or taking the card back and getting a different card with better cooling.
 
Ok I have confirmed that I had it overclocked too far and she just shuts down to the 2d clocks. I certainly cannot turn up the volts here after all there is just too much chance that the VRM's are the problem anyways. So I will make the decision over the next couple of days on whether to keep the card or just go get something else.
 
rick5127 said:
On your voltage thing... it doesn't take effect until MSI Afterburner is restarted. Did you try that?
Click to expand...

yes i rebooted and it is still not avaliable.
Is there some utility which actually shows the amount of shaders avaliable from the card, and not just from the name of the card? maybe gigabyte has been up to something.

It ran 6806s all night at around 11900 PPD. (i have not been sent anything but 6806 since i got this card, so i have nothing to compare it to)
 
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Thanks!
Just had a look with GPU-Z and everything appears to be just what an SE is supposed to be.
 
I've got a EVGA GTX 570 that does about 13k ppd, those 460's are barely slower it seems. My old GTX 260 SLI system would do about 15k ppd.
 
I have new appreciation for my GTX 460's today. The stock cooler is awesome and I guess 40nm is just very low power. I was checking the afterburner settings on the 768mb card in my brother's gaming computer that I borg and found that the fan speed as been at the minimum setting all this time. Thats 30% or 1200rpm which is basically inaudible even in a silent room with such a small GPU fan. The card is oc'd to 850mhz (up from 675mhz) with 0.975V and running a 6806 wu (11.5kppd) it was only hitting 79C! I did an experiment with the fan maxed at 4krpm and I was able to get the core down 43C!:cool:
The ambient in the room are about 19C and the card is in an Antec 300 with 5 mid speed 120mm fans so it has cool air to work with but still. A bit of a departure from the 9800 GX2 days where you maxed the jet blower and covered your ears to keep the cards stable. You could build a naked folder using GTX 460 that is so quiet you would have to put your ear beside the fans to hear them.
 
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yanno, one of my 570s does 13-14 and the other does around 17KPPD.... same clocks, I have not been able to figure out why tho....
 
APOLLO said:
IIRC, the GTX 470s are producing about 11-12K PPD now depending on frequency, and not very far from these results. It could just be the type of WUs in the field presently. Anything can change in the future.
Click to expand...

I pull a consistent 14.5-14.9k with my 470 at 750/1500/1800 and 1v. I can also run 800/1600/1800 at 1.062v which churns out about 15.7k. I have heard the low 470 numbers like you mentioned elsewhere as well, I wonder if the drivers improved their folding performance along the way somewhere.

Defex I am also shocked at the output of that SE, it pretty much matches what the 1gb you have coming this week does at 850.

It seems the 460's are like the G92's where the 9600GSO puts out pretty similar numbers to an 8800GT. In anycase, the ppd output is definitely impacted by more than just shader count. My GT240 with 96 shaders pumps out 4.5k all day on the gpu2 client while my GTX 280 with 240 shaders only gets 8.5k.
 
Strange. I think the wild variance in performance is probably attributable to different WUs. It's good to know that GTX 470s are still capable of achieving close to 16K PPD. I was under the impression that level of production was in the past with the initial crop of WUs; looks like it's not the case. That's great for the Fermi folks. :cool:

Now, I'm assuming no other process is competing with the GPU core in the lower performance reports. I want to mention it's important to check all processes, especially in a non-dedicated folding box to ensure there's no contention for CPU time. That's why I always use a priority/affinity utility to increase GPU core priority level to at least 'normal' and sometimes even to 'high', in order to guarantee I'm always seeing the max potential of all my cards regardless of their software environment.
 
GPU's for dummies help needed - GTX 460 running a bit slow.

My GTX 460 - 1GB @ 800 Mhz core clock is getting 8700ppd on 6806 units - by all accounts that seem a little low.

It is in the second slot of a mid 2007 era Asus P5K deluxe. There is a GTX 285 in the first slot getting 9200ppd. CPUs not folding while I work this out.

Looking in Afterburner core is fully engaged at correct frequency. Temps 59-60c.

Ideas?
 
may i be worthy said:
GPU's for dummies help needed - GTX 460 running a bit slow.

My GTX 460 - 1GB @ 800 Mhz core clock is getting 8700ppd on 6806 units - by all accounts that seem a little low.

It is in the second slot of a mid 2007 era Asus P5K deluxe. There is a GTX 285 in the first slot getting 9200ppd. CPUs not folding while I work this out.

Looking in Afterburner core is fully engaged at correct frequency. Temps 59-60c.

Ideas?
Click to expand...

Well son of a @#$%&...he is breaking out the GPUs on me.... :)
 
musky said:
Well son of a @#$%&...he is breaking out the GPUs on me.... :)
Click to expand...

lol - you are tired from overclocking new D - you missed my notification of Adding Awesome New Temporary D - mucking around with the remnants of my Q6600 farm fixing things up for sale - what I should keep and what I should sell. So far I have one rig with 2 GPUs doing 18k for 380 watts :rolleyes: - which if I run for 5 days might make up for that bigadv I borked.

Don't worry, I am not going to unleash 6 Q6600s running 6701s on yo ass.:cool:
 
may i be worthy said:
GPU's for dummies help needed - GTX 460 running a bit slow.

My GTX 460 - 1GB @ 800 Mhz core clock is getting 8700ppd on 6806 units - by all accounts that seem a little low.

It is in the second slot of a mid 2007 era Asus P5K deluxe. There is a GTX 285 in the first slot getting 9200ppd. CPUs not folding while I work this out.

Looking in Afterburner core is fully engaged at correct frequency. Temps 59-60c.

Ideas?
Click to expand...
MIBW, stupid question but at you using the GPU3 client for the 460?
 
Well for all my testing I was doing 6806's. But for the last few days I am now getting 6801's. I overclocked both cards (GPU3 by the way) to 850 on the Palit 1gb, and 880 on the EVGA 768. Seems both cards are right around 12000 ppd. I built a fan profile in Afterburner that increases the fan as the temps go up. Temps are 56c on the EVGA and 60 on the Palit. System is pulling 400watts at the wall.

I also have an instance of SMP running and have both GPU's set at low priority (folding client option) and idle for the SMP. SMP is churning around 3K ppd on a 6702 wu.

fwiw.
 
Oh and one other thing, I think the ppd for 6801's and 6806's are pretty close to the same although I haven't had a 6806 in several days.
 
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