3 cards

O

OldDeadOne

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 10, 2001
Messages
1,139
anyone use 3 cards in their system? Do you use them standalone each or in sli or crossfire mode? I've always wondered how this would be done for distributed computing....
 
OldDeadOne said:
anyone use 3 cards in their system? Do you use them standalone each or in sli or crossfire mode? I've always wondered how this would be done for distributed computing....
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Stand alone, F@h doesn't use sli or crossfire as there is insufficient bandwidth across the sli/xfire connectors
 
extide said:
That's interesting, I never knew that was the reason why they didnt use SLI/CF.
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I don't think its the only reason but it has been mentioned several times when the question has come up over at FF
 
If you have more than one card, do you have to turn off sli/crossfire, or does the folding software take care of that? For instance, if your sli computer went idle with the Windows client running in a multiple GPU system would it use them both?
 
You must turn off sli when you fold, or one of the gpu units will make zero progress and the other one's tpf will increase greatly. that's what happened to me when I forgot to turn off sli with V7, 14 hours wasted :mad: you do NOT have to remove the sli bridge.
 
Same with Bitcoin and AMD cards.

Well, except you can leave crossfire enabled if the motherboard supports it and the miners don't care. I mined for a while with 2 cards on a board that didn't even have crossfire support.
 
You can certainly fold on two GPUs with a SLI bridge attached. Some folks do need to disable the SLI mode in the control panel to fold, but many folks do not. I have one rig with SLI and another with 3 GPU w/o SLI bridges.

If you not gaming with the system, then it certainly easier not to mess with the bridges and SLI / CF modes. I would mention, you'll have less problems if all three GPUs are the same series (ie Nvidia 400 or 500, or 600)
 
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One note on folding with 3 Fermi GPUs - when I last tried this a couple months ago, an Athlon II X2 was not enough processor to run all three cards. It was pegged at 100% and my ppd was suffering. We suspect a bug of some sort in the GPU client code, as a single card barely uses any processor. Once you have two or more, you start sucking up cores pretty badly.
 
musky said:
One note on folding with 3 Fermi GPUs - when I last tried this a couple months ago, an Athlon II X2 was not enough processor to run all three cards. It was pegged at 100% and my ppd was suffering. We suspect a bug of some sort in the GPU client code, as a single card barely uses any processor. Once you have two or more, you start sucking up cores pretty badly.
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Interesting. I recently lost a boxen and was considering adding some inexpensive 650/650Ti 's to empty PCI-E slots on my existing SMP boxen to compensate, but now I'm not so sure...
 
If you are on the fence, it may be worth waiting until PG rolls out the QRB for GPU WU and see if the PPD make it worthwhile.

(Looking back at that sentence, I realize that the number of acronyms would make that a foreign language to those not in the fold.) :D
 
I'm running 4 GPU's in one comp, 3 Nivida and 1 ATI. No issues running other DC projects WGC, POEM, Collatz, Einstein. Haven't tried Folding on it.
 
rhavern said:
If you are on the fence, it may be worth waiting until PG rolls out the QRB for GPU WU and see if the PPD make it worthwhile.

(Looking back at that sentence, I realize that the number of acronyms would make that a foreign language to those not in the fold.) :D
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Are you still doing Prime Grid? I haven't run that in a while,ever since they started shrinking PPD and got me pissed off over it(I was up to 68 million total when I quit I think). I was kicking ass back then and I doubt they changed their minds on that. I would love to go back to Prime Grid as I was chasing 100 million back then.
 
Closely related...

... does this mean I can have two nVidia cards in the same system (660TI and 430) both folding with the same Win7 program? It'd be nice to use both cards in one system rather than a second box. Power efficiency and all that... landlord's grumpy about power use.
 
BlueMax said:
Closely related...

... does this mean I can have two nVidia cards in the same system (660TI and 430) both folding with the same Win7 program? It'd be nice to use both cards in one system rather than a second box. Power efficiency and all that... landlord's grumpy about power use.
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Yes, I have not tried to set it up with the v7 client but it shouldn't be too difficult
 
I have a 550 and a 560 folding in the same box using v7 just add a 2nd gpu and you are on your way. real easy :D
 
I'm waiting on a PSU to come in then will have a 3 gpu box going. Won't be using an sli bridge, will be using v7 client.
 
Yes you just drop in another fah capable card, and add the gpu slot in the gui, it's very straightforward. As a side note, you can put the cards in pci-e x1 slots (if their open ended, or you hack them to be) and your performance shouldn't suffer. Multiple GPUs in non-sli boards ;)

I just performed surgery on one of my non sli boards and it now has a q8400, 460 and a 550ti crunching away. Oddly enough, the 550ti performs better on that board, in an x1 slot than it did in an x16 slot on an AMD Socket AM2+ board o_O
 
Taranabas said:
Yes you just drop in another fah capable card, and add the gpu slot in the gui, it's very straightforward. As a side note, you can put the cards in pci-e x1 slots (if their open ended, or you hack them to be) and your performance shouldn't suffer. Multiple GPUs in non-sli boards ;)
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At one point I was folding with a card that was outside of the case, using a pci-e x1 extender through the back panel.
 
Taranabas said:
Yes you just drop in another fah capable card, and add the gpu slot in the gui, it's very straightforward. As a side note, you can put the cards in pci-e x1 slots (if their open ended, or you hack them to be) and your performance shouldn't suffer. Multiple GPUs in non-sli boards ;)

I just performed surgery on one of my non sli boards and it now has a q8400, 460 and a 550ti crunching away. Oddly enough, the 550ti performs better on that board, in an x1 slot than it did in an x16 slot on an AMD Socket AM2+ board o_O
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Hmmm, this intrigues me. I like the idea of this, avoids the whole "why are there so few cheap triple GPU motherboards on the market" question. <evil plan mode=on>
 
Yep, works great. Apparently the bit coin fellers have been doing it for a while. On some mobos a jumper may be required on the pcie slot to activate the slot.
 
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