ok, i updated the original post to now include a guide to put these cards to work. while i was writing the guide, the computer crashed, and i had to rewrite the whole thing. my OC'ed CPU was on the edge of stability, just barely enough to be stable with the old video card. with the new 480 plugged in, it somehow became unstable, and i have no idea why since it's just switching video cards. i decreased the cpu by 150mhz (temporarily), and the system seems stable.
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so i'm trying to compare my 480 to the gt240 and gtx260 that i have to see relative performance. this was a little hard since setting my other machines to only accept the exact beta WU's that the 480 crunches at because BOINC only allowed these beta WU for fermi cards (ACEMD beta version v6.23 (cuda30)) and would not let me download them. when i downloaded the WU on the fermi machine, i suspended the task, uninstalled the video drivers, plugged in my gt240, and reinstalled the correct drivers since the 480 and gt240 uses different drivers.
after my gt240 competed the WU for the fermi, i was a little surprised when i saw the results. it only took twice the amount of time to finish the WU (23.5minutes). at this rate, it's a projection of 16.5k points/day, which is exactly half of the gtx280. when crunching on the other beta WU (ACEMD beta version v6.22 (cuda)), my gt240 even gave more points, at a projection of 18k points/day. all parameters of the test was the same.
to be honest, i'm a little disappointed with the outputs of these fermi's. it's sad to see that two $50 cards will give the same, or even more computational power than a $500 card at a much lower power consumption
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http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?hostid=69365
Here are my beta work units being completed with 2 GTX 480s running at 1550 shader with an i7 920 with HT on at 3.2ghz and SWAN_SYNC set to 0 to allow each work unit to utilize an entire thread.
Last edited by Danger30Q; 05-03-2010 at 01:08 PM.
"no access" for me
My Biggest Fear Is When I die, My Wife Sells All My Stuff For What I Told Her I Paid For It.79 SB threads and 32 IB Threads across 4 rigs 111 threads Crunching!!
Link to Dangers' host with the 480 rather than his personal ID.
http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?hostid=69365
I don't think something is right ... here is a link to my 480 at stock speeds on an i7-920 HT On / 3.285 GHz / SYNC_SORT=0
http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?hostid=31780
I'm coming in much faster, typically around ~675 seconds while yours is at ~1100.
The only difference I can see is that I am running Win7 64 Home Premium and you have Ultimate which should not make a difference.
Are you sure you have SYNC_SORT as the environment var with a value of 0 and have you completly stopped BOINC and restarted it? Sometimes BOINC does not stop even when you tell it to so I rebooted.
Do you have your BOINC folder excluded from any AV scanning?
Last edited by Snow Crash; 05-03-2010 at 09:55 AM.
Danger30Q, something looks very off with your results when it's taking over 1000sec (17min) . it shouldn't take that long to finish a WU. mine is at stock clocks, no SWAN_SYNC, and win7 OS completes in about 13.5minues. are you also gaming with it while crunching? here are my latest results:
Last edited by WhiteFireDragon; 05-03-2010 at 10:08 AM.
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Just finally got my machine built and configured last night. Attempted to pull some WU's but I hadn't changed my pref's to only pull the beta app. I'll know tonight if it is all working on my end. 2 470's and Ubuntu 10.04. Currently using 195.16.18 until the x.x.24 drivers hit the ubuntu repo's or ppa's.
I know the SWAN_SYNC set to 0 is working properly b/c each unit uses 13% of my i7 with HT meaning it's using an entire thread. I'm not gaming and I've restarted BOINC many times with system restarts. I have the Nvidia control panel power management set to maximum performance as well as my Win7 power management to high performance.
Each GPU is only at 40% usage.
EDIT: Is SWAN_SYNC and SYNC_SORT the same thing? I only have SWAN_SYNC set to 0 as a System variable.
I'm using MSI Afterburner to overclock the card. I'm going to try EVGA Precision 1.9.2 later tonight. For some reason, GPUGrid is only showing that my card is running at 0.81ghz. I'm hoping I'll have better luck with Precision, and I'm going to update to BOINC 6.10.51 released on May 2.
Last edited by Danger30Q; 05-03-2010 at 01:10 PM.
if the "acemdbeta" process in the task manager shows 13% CPU usage, then you have it the SWAN_SYNC correct. it's very odd why your performance is so bad. only reason i can think of, is that if you overclocks fail, your core and shaders will downclock. DL the EVGA precision (don't DL from official nvidia, theirs is not updated) or GPUz to check the gpu usage and clocks when it's crunching to make sure it's correct. at stock, your core usage should be 50%, and a little less when overclockedOriginally Posted by Danger30Q
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I'm just getting no work is available for acemd beta version / acemd beta version is not available for your type of computer. 2 470s - linux
Did you make sure to select yes to the option "Run test applications?" in the GPUGrid preferences? I made this mistake for about a day of being told there were no ACEMD beta work units to download.
Sorry for the confusion I caused on the environmental var ... you are all correct ... it is SWAN_SYNC.
The only time I see WU that slow is after a driver crash and the GPU goes into a low power mode ... I have precision 1.9.2 and it will show what speed it is actually running, not just what it is set to. Once the driver resets itself the only way to back up to full speed is to reboot :-(
I came home today to find that there were no more beta work units available. Hopefully they refill the beta work unit pool asap.
I'll be trying out Precision tonight instead of Afterburner and hopefully that improves the speed of completion.
this is not right is it? 40%, you should be way higher, no? thats like 2d
i hope they get this figured out. i am not impressed at all with fermi, i know these cards are supposed to kick arse
just for clarification, when setting the SWAN_SYNC, is the vairable name "SWAN_SYNC=0" and the variable value is "1", or is the variable name "SWAN_SYNC" with the value "0"? win7 forces me to enter a value and i don't know what number to put. so left pic or right pic?
btw, how did you guys figure out this trick about SWAN_SYNC? i tried to google it, and nothing came up. what does swan_sync mean and how does it work?
yeah sometimes it doesn't give beta WU, but that only happened once to me. during this time that you didn't get them, i still received them fine.
did you ever figure out has to why your WU's take over 1000+ sec? your GPU at 40% is a little low, unless you had an extremely high overclock. it should be around 50%.
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well its been almost 24 hours of no work available messages for me. I just want 2 wu's to verify that everything is working.
SWAN_SYNC is the variable and the value is 0.
There was so much clamor about using a whole CPU thread to process a GPU WU in the past that they gave this to us as an option rather than force it on us.
http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread....rap=true#16666
(For those that do not know, GDF is the head honcho over at GPUGrid)
My betas have dried up for now also but I have Collatz set up with a resource percent of 1 so it doesn't interfer with GPUGrid but will pull a WU when GPUGrid runs dry. I hate being idle
With HT off, I'm getting around 65% GPU load with my 480 and full CPU thread, and around 8 minutes for a WU.
With HT on, sharing CPU cycle with 12 threads of WGC, I'm getting around 60% GPU load, and 9 minutes for a WU.
My 480 is overclocked to 850Mhz though, so that's got to contribute to reduce the work time.
Getting a steady stream of WUs from GPUGRID at the moment, with pauses of around 10 minute max before receiving a new WU to crunch.
I don't understand why I am not getting WUs when other people are. Here are my pref's for that computer. Everything looks in order to me... Is it because I'm on Linux?
Resource share
If you participate in multiple BOINC projects, this is the proportion of your resources used by GPUGRID 100
Use NVIDIA GPU if present
(enforced by 6.10+ clients) yes
Run test applications?
This helps us develop applications, but may cause jobs to fail on your computer yes
Is it OK for GPUGRID and your team (if any) to email you?
Emails will be sent from ps3grid@gmail.com; make sure your spam filter accepts this address. yes
Should GPUGRID show your computers on its web site? yes
Default computer location home
Maximum CPU % for graphics
0 ... 100 75
Run only the selected applications ACEMD: no
ACEMD ver 2.0: no
ACEMD beta: yes
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? no
Use Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) if available yes
Use Central Processing Unit (CPU) yes
You only have betas checked?
Are there wu's available?
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i posted a guide on the very first post of this thread. you left out one important part in step #3. i highlighted it bold and red for you. you currently have it set to "no", it should be "yes"
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I looked at a lot of accounts on GPUGrid and only found 470 running linux and they have not got any new betas in the last two days.
GPUGrid set the beta up originally on Linux and us Windows types are trying to find out how we can match (much less beat) their runtime?
Then you should update the image in your howto as it shows only the beta radio button selected, not the acemd.
thanks though! we'll see if that has any effect
what do you mean "beta radio" button? i have something wrong on there? did you get yours crunching yet?
Last edited by WhiteFireDragon; 05-04-2010 at 10:32 AM.
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on the gpugrid preferences page screenshot, you only have
ACEMD - no check mark
ACEMD - ver 2.0 - no check mark
ACEMD beta - checked
which is what I had originally as my set up, but you said I need to change ACEMD to yes, unless I am misunderstanding you.
But no, still unable to pull any WUs, but that may very well be becasue there are none available.
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