A64 X2 program stability and Folding

[Strikemaster]

OK, after all the waiting, snarling at Gigabyte, more waiting and such, I've got about two weeks of output from my X2 4400+ / Ultra-939 combo. It is REALLY nice seeing the ~2500 PPW this critter throws down, and the buttery smoothness of dual CPU response, but there's a little nagging problem.

Unreal Tournament. My guilty pleasure.

On my old dual Athlon rig, running two instances of FAH and UT was like falling down stairs or baiting a post out of K*, it just worked. On this rig, its hit or miss whether UT will run, or act like it is a poster child for Tourette's Software Syndrome. If the machine has been freshly booted, no problem. Two instances of FAH going and me trying to cripple myself with carpal tunnel for three hours or so. Smoooooooth running. Try to start UT after the machine's been running an hour or two? Knee-walking drunks don't stagger that much!

Just curious if anyone else has seen things like this in similar circumstance.

 

[Tormond]

My machine has been up for about 2 weeks now running F@H on both cores (X2-4400+) and I fired up HL2 last night just to screw around for a few minutes and the game played very smoothly for me in 1920x1200 with maximum everything turned on (6xAA 16XAF). Only problem I had was when I shut the game down it took it a minute or so to "catch up" in windows (my guess is because of teh 100% CPU usage all the time)

 

[magnusvir]

Maybe its b/c you are running low on RAM which I guess you may have considered that and accounted for it or because one of the FAH cores and UT is competeing for CPU #1. I suggest you add the -local flag to each of your FAH console and then check which one is machine ID #1. Maybe that will help.

Good luck

 

[Strikemaster]

Interesting. What board you hosting that 4400+ with, AGP or PCI-E?

The rig:
X2 4400+
Gigabyte K8NS-Ultra 939, F7 BIOS
ATI X800 XT AGP vid card / Catalyst 5.6 drivers
Ballistix PC3200, 1 gig (512 x 2)
Half a dozen Ultra160 SCSI drives and such...

 

[Strikemaster]

Maybe its b/c you are running low on RAM which I guess you may have considered that and accounted for it or because one of the FAH cores and UT is competeing for CPU #1. I suggest you add the -local flag to each of your FAH console and then check which one is machine ID #1. Maybe that will help.

Good luck

I'll try this and see what shakes out.

Is the -local switch really necessary, given that I ran each setup for the console in it's \\$home directory and spec'ed the client # when prompted? I sort of assumed it was a default after running the advanced options in setup...

 

[EnderXC]

Interesting. What board you hosting that 4400+ with, AGP or PCI-E?

The rig:
X2 4400+
Gigabyte K8NS-Ultra 939, F7 BIOS
ATI X800 XT AGP vid card / Catalyst 5.6 drivers
Ballistix PC3200, 1 gig (512 x 2)
Half a dozen Ultra160 SCSI drives and such...

What problems did you have with gigabyte? I have that board and what will I have to do before upgrading?

 

[Tormond]

I am running a Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe w/ 1GB Corsair LLXMS PCI-E with dual 7800GTXs
Pretty much teh machine in my sig

 

[Strikemaster]

What problems did you have with gigabyte? I have that board and what will I have to do before upgrading?

Well, aside from the eleven weeks between AMD announcing immediate availability and Gigabyte finally getting a X2 BIOS out for the board, not much so far. Before swapping in the X2, flash the BIOS up to F8 , kick it to default, then drop the CPU in and have at it.

I'm considering a clean reload of the OS, just to make sure there isn't something weirdly off with the HAL.

 

[Strikemaster]

I am running a Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe w/ 1GB Corsair LLXMS PCI-E with dual 7800GTXs
Pretty much teh machine in my sig

SLI 7800GTXs?

Holy puppy shit! Not expecting to be obsolete next week, are you?

 

[Tormond]

Well I am waiting to be able to fold on em And I had a chance to get rid of my Ultras and get the 7800s for only about $200 Out of Pocket so I jumped on it

 

[T-3]

when you setup folding did you tell it to use large wu's?
if you did, reconfigure it and tell it not to use large wu's and see what happens.

I only run -local and -forceasm on my duallies and use one of them as my unreal server with no problems.

 

[Bill Clo]

I second the idea of reinstalling the OS. I'm not a real expert, but doesn't the OS need special drivers, etc, for a multi-processor system setup? It'd need to reconfigure the OS for such, I'd imagine.

Let us know how it works out, willya?

 

[Kvothe]

Maybe its b/c you are running low on RAM which I guess you may have considered that and accounted for it or because one of the FAH cores and UT is competeing for CPU #1. I suggest you add the -local flag to each of your FAH console and then check which one is machine ID #1. Maybe that will help.

To further that line of thought, would you by chance, be running big WU's? The problem with memory bandwidth isn't as bad with AMD chips, although it might be possible to saturate the HT bus if you're running biggies.

 

[Strikemaster]

To further that line of thought, would you by chance, be running big WU's? The problem with memory bandwidth isn't as bad with AMD chips, although it might be possible to saturate the HT bus if you're running biggies.

Haven't seen a large WU on this machine yet since the shift to the X2.

The machine is running dual-channel Crucial Ballistix, 512m x2 for 1 gig of RAM, and at the moment, is using barely 450 meg total physical RAM for the OS, Opera w/ 5 tabs open, a P2015-BBA5 (231pt) and the infamous p1477_release 31_0 (364pt) "Black Marbles" GROMACS.

It is not overclocked in any way. There. I said it. The intervention may now begin...

The test started last night seems to be bearing fruit. Running both instances of FAH502 with the "-local" switch, and so far, UT is running in a pretty much normal fashion. No stuttering, and more to the point, doesn't skip madly like a spasmatic with the VCR set to "blue-shift" fast forward.

Bill_C: I hate to say it, but XP properly detected the duals and punched in the right HAL. I'm not saying that the reload isn't needed (especially with the flaked-out drive cable episode last month), but so far, so good.

Will update tomorrow.

 

[Strikemaster]

Day 2, and unfortunately the problem resurfaced. Nasty video skipping occurring, like it is calculating things corrrectly, but it only shows randomly compressed "squirts" of frames. Think of vsync gone horribly awry, and you get the idea.

I hate reloading the system, but that's the next step. Either that, or step up to UT2k4.