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Folding for heat this winter

R-Type

R-Type

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - October 2011
Joined
Mar 6, 2006
Messages
2,806
I recently moved out to Seattle and have a nice 2 bedroom apartment with neighbors left and right, above and below and with only one exterior wall. As a result, I really don't need much in the way of heat but absolutely loathe the idea of using the built in electric heat on really cold days. The way I figure, if I am going to use electricity to heat the apartment then it damn well better be doing some work first.

Enter folding at home.
I played around with this way back in the Athlon XP days but haven't done much since so I'm pretty clueless.

For hardware I will be using 4 systems:

C2Q 9550 at 4ghz with GTX 280
C2Q 6600 at 3ghz with GT 240
Athlon II x4 at 3ghz with GTX 460
PS3

I know the nvidia gpu's should be able to churn out some respectable units and was looking at this setup thread for guidance http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1550668

My questions are as follows:

-Is it possible to have both the GPU and CPU folding at the same time on each machine?
-How does the rank tracking work? I know I put in 33 for the team, do I just put in my forum handle for the user field and automatically pop up on the ranking?
-How transparent is the resource throttling? I remember it making my system sluggish on the athlon XP which is why I stopped, do the new clients do a good job freeing up resources when you launch a game or something?

Thanks for the help and sorry for another noob thread, I look forward to working with you guys.
 
R-Type said:
My questions are as follows:

-Is it possible to have both the GPU and CPU folding at the same time on each machine?
-How does the rank tracking work? I know I put in 33 for the team, do I just put in my forum handle for the user field and automatically pop up on the ranking?
-How transparent is the resource throttling? I remember it making my system sluggish on the athlon XP which is why I stopped, do the new clients do a good job freeing up resources when you launch a game or something?

Thanks for the help and sorry for another noob thread, I look forward to working with you guys.
Click to expand...

Yes, it is possible to do both GPU and CPU folding at the same time.

Go to the Stanford website and get a passkey and be sure to put it in your SMP client. Go here to get it: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/getpasskey.py

Resource throttling as you put it is very good. You can do anything you want with the computer running the SMP client and won't even notice it. The GPU client is another beast and it will slow down graphics performance in games.

Let us know if you have anymore questions.

Fold On!

 
Welcome to the team!

And we love noob threads as you put it. Gives us a reason to hang out here and help the next gen of folders.

 
Alright, I'm up and running on one machine. CPU is pegged but the GTX 460 seems to be alternating between its mid clocked speed of 450mhz and its full clock of 850mhz and the temps are about in the middle between idle and load. Is this normal?

Where do we track the team members and their ranks?
 
R-Type said:
Alright, I'm up and running on one machine. CPU is pegged but the GTX 460 seems to be alternating between its mid clocked speed of 450mhz and its full clock of 850mhz and the temps are about in the middle between idle and load. Is this normal?
Click to expand...

I have found it best the set cpu to idle priority and the gpu to above idle ( i think thats what the client calls it) then both run 100%
 
R-Type said:
Alright, I'm up and running on one machine. CPU is pegged but the GTX 460 seems to be alternating between its mid clocked speed of 450mhz and its full clock of 850mhz and the temps are about in the middle between idle and load. Is this normal?

Where do we track the team members and their ranks?
Click to expand...


what drivers are you using on the gtx 460?
 
262.99 with modified inf, something is definitely not working as the client keeps going to sleep on the gpu. I'll play around with it later today.

Hah, I'm rank 5300 on the [H] team. Lets see how high I can get my ppd with the hardware I have....

I can already see how this gets addicting, its like the leveling grind in an rpg.
 
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probably need to go back to the 260.89 or what ever drivers those were since the 262.99's are ment for the gtx 580 even though you can run the modified inf file to make them work in games. its a pain in the ass with nvidia. as much as gamers try to praise nvidia's drivers they are typically garbage for us folders. maybe 1 in every 3 driver versions actually work. maybe 1 in 5 are completely flawless for us. so you basically have to find a balance of what drivers you need for games and what works best for F@H. so far the 258.96 drivers have been the completely flawless drivers for a while. one note, remember to never use beta drivers if your folding because they rarely ever work correctly.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
probably need to go back to the 260.89 or what ever drivers those were since the 262.99's are ment for the gtx 580 even though you can run the modified inf file to make them work in games. its a pain in the ass with nvidia. as much as gamers try to praise nvidia's drivers they are typically garbage for us folders. maybe 1 in every 3 driver versions actually work. maybe 1 in 5 are completely flawless for us. so you basically have to find a balance of what drivers you need for games and what works best for F@H. so far the 258.96 drivers have been the completely flawless drivers for a while. one note, remember to never use beta drivers if your folding because they rarely ever work correctly.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info, I will roll my drivers this evening.

I have the client running on my fiance's pc and the GT240 with 257.12 drivers is crushing the Q6600 in ppd, I can't wait to get the comparatively powerful 280 and 460 going.

Edit: I got the Radeon 4250 igp on the AMD system folding as well.... currently tracking for 142ppd. :D It has its own sideport memory but I'm thinking the cpu overhead required to drive the extra cpu instance probably detracts more from the SMP performance than the igp adds. Still, I thought this was hillarious.
 
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have you figured out HFM for points tracking?
 
jebo_4jc said:
have you figured out HFM for points tracking?
Click to expand...

No I haven't used that, I was just looking at the EOC stats which don't seem to be very current. Would the HFM allow me to track my aggregate points from the 4 machines I have folding?
 
I found the code there for my folding signature, do I just add that in with my normal sig? It doesn't show correctly in the preview.
 
it won't work. This forum doesn't allow images in signatures (a good thing, I think)

there are instructions around here somewhere that tell you how to insert javascript into your bookmarks in Firefox to automagically insert the image, but all our stickies are gone.
 
Gotcha, I was wondering how ciggwin and Dookey were having theirs show up.
 
Seems like you figured it out? I have mine as "[H] post" in my Firefox bookmark toolbar and I click that instead of Submit/Post Quick Reply (when I remember)

 
I just pasted it into the message to see if it worked. I'm assuming you have a macro of some sort, is it chrome compatible? Of course, I don't really need to be showing off my score until I get it up higher...;)

Apparently it was a mistake to configure the F@H client on my PS3 on the 8th and not do anything else until yesterday as it will be a drag on my PPD for a while now. It seems kind of odd to have that be the main ranking criteria, I could have never contributed before and then register and start folding on 10 machines with GPU's and instantly be in the top 20 while people who have contributed for years on a couple machines would be ranked below me. I'm assuming this has been discussed ad naseum here though...
 
New question, what are the 'big adv' jobs people keep mentioning?
 
R-Type said:
New question, what are the 'big adv' jobs people keep mentioning?
Click to expand...

bigadv are very large SMP work units, with very short deadlines, requiring 8-cores or more to fold.
 
R-Type said:
New question, what are the 'big adv' jobs people keep mentioning?
Click to expand...

They are extra large work units that can only run on a highly OC-ed i7 or better.

The faster you can run the the more bonus points you get.

There are a few of us that have built dual xeon rigs that can be OC-ed (SR-2) to get the WU done as quickly as possible.
 
Gotcha.

Well I finally got all my machines up and running, the 260.99 drivers are working well for me. Here are my preliminary numbers (I don't have any historical data for average across project types)

C2Q 9550 at 4ghz with GTX 280 - 16,500 ppd (8000 SMP, 8500 GPU)
C2Q 6600 at 3ghz with GT 240 - 9000 ppd (4500 SMP, 4500 GPU)*
Athlon II x4 at 3ghz with GTX 460 - 15.500 ppd (4000 SMP, 11,500 GPU)
PS3 - I think its like 1000ppd

*I'm only folding on three cores with the Q6600 because its in a Shuttle and gets reallly loud at full load on 4 cores)

I also have a 8600GT in the 9550 machine driving side monitors but that gives me repeated unstable hardware failures. Not really sure whats up with that as it never hiccuped when it was the primary gaming card in the shuttle and hasn't shown any instability driving the side monitors. I'm not too terribly worried about it given its low work potential...

So does this look about right? That would be about 43,000 ppd minus downtime for a couple hours of gaming daily. From the stat tracker, it looks like this should break me into the top 100 for the Horde eventually?
 
R-Type said:
I just pasted it into the message to see if it worked. I'm assuming you have a macro of some sort, is it chrome compatible? Of course, I don't really need to be showing off my score until I get it up higher...;)

Apparently it was a mistake to configure the F@H client on my PS3 on the 8th and not do anything else until yesterday as it will be a drag on my PPD for a while now. It seems kind of odd to have that be the main ranking criteria, I could have never contributed before and then register and start folding on 10 machines with GPU's and instantly be in the top 20 while people who have contributed for years on a couple machines would be ranked below me. I'm assuming this has been discussed ad naseum here though...
Click to expand...

You can paste it in, but there is code on http://hardfolding.com to make it into a bookmark "button" - after you choose your color for your badge on your personal page, you will be taken to a page that has all the code. You just make a new bookmark out of that code.

 
Thanks to everyone for the help getting set up, I've had a productive first week and I'm currently #66 for the team in PPD average. I can't wait until my GTX470 arrives Thursday, I think I can break 50k ppd without any dedicated boxen. :)
 
nice!

I wonder if I have the "highest PPD without a dedicated boxen" honor on the team.
 
jebo_4jc said:
nice!

I wonder if I have the "highest PPD without a dedicated boxen" honor on the team.
Click to expand...

Wow, you're over 100k without boxen? What do you use all those pc's for :eek:? (Still, very jealous)

The great unknown question for me is, how much is this adding to my power bill.... So far I'm rationalizing it through having replaced all our lightbulbs with CFL's and not running heat in the winter, I guess we'll see when the first bill comes.
 
SR2/GTX470s: workstation/general use/gaming
i7/9800GT: server
Q6600/9800GX2: basement HTPC/some gaming
X6/GTX460: upstairs HTPC/gaming

That's about it. All those rigs are overkill for their usage models (especially on the CPUs) but they all serve a purpose.

I do have an undervolted/underclocked Athlon II x4 as a bedroom HTPC, but it's only producing about 2k ppd.

I also fold uniprocessor WUs on my laptop, but those are only good for about 800 ppd.
 
Heh, I've been playing with the my Athlon II x4 rig for the last couple of days overclocking it. The biggest takeaway? That I have been extremely spoiled by my last few intel builds. This thing reminds me of overclocking my Athlon64's and XP's.

For example, it always seems like if a 775 build is going to fail prime 95, it does so within the first hour. This thing? Failure at the 11 hour mark... WTF. Then you add northbridge clocking to the mix... it was much easier when it was just undervolted to 1.2v at stock speed :p.

And God the volts these things take relative to the Intel chips is insane, the damn stock VID on the thing was 1.4V! Thats higher than Intel even specs their chips and AMD saw fit to stamp that thing with their seal of approval and ship it out. Currently at 3.3ghz and 1.35v where it will likely stay until Sandy Bridge comes out and it is replaced by my sig rig board.

EDIT: Yes I know all about the vastly different processes between AMD and Intel's fabs, I'm just whining :)
 
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As far as power consumption goes you should figure about 400w per machine. A little less with some of them, a little more with others. But I bet you will avg around 400 per box.

Or you can go buy a Kill O Watt meter. They are cheap and will give you actual numbers. Plug them in the wall, plug your pc into them, read the meter.
 
Not to thread-jack, but my condo's heat apparently died last night, so I need to fire up ALL the boxen today and generate some toasty GPU heat. :D
 
SazanEyes said:
Not to thread-jack, but my condo's heat apparently died last night, so I need to fire up ALL the boxen today and generate some toasty GPU heat. :D
Click to expand...

It works surprisingly well, the TDP's of my cpu's and gpu's together total over 1000W which is more than some electric space heaters.

...And electric space heaters have a much lower ppd ;)
 
my basement would freeze without my folding going on.
 
(maybe see on an advertisement some day)

"Furnace failed? Rent heat from the company MORE D!
Not only heat your house do science at the same time."

finer print
"MORE D will not be responsible for elevated electric bills"
 
nwrtarget said:
(maybe see on an advertisement some day)

"Furnace failed? Rent heat from the company MORE D!
Not only heat your house do science at the same time."

finer print
"MORE D will not be responsible for elevated electric bills"
Click to expand...


Well the power draw shouldn't be any higher than a comparable electric heater.
 
My GTX460s don't put off enough HEAT. The room in my basement they are supposed to be heating is too cold!
 
you are doing it wrong with 460's. throw in 2 4870x2's for a sufficient space heater. bottled water on my desk turns piss warm after about 15 mins of bad company 2 :D
 
audirs said:
you are doing it wrong with 460's. throw in 2 4870x2's for a sufficient space heater. bottled water on my desk turns piss warm after about 15 mins of bad company 2 :D
Click to expand...
lol

Not sure my Toughpower 750W is up to the task of anything too much bigger.

I'm playing with the idea of moving my two GTX470s to this box and moving the 460s to my gaming rig.
 
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