I think we are due to an update seeing as it's been over 2 years since the last post

Currently to get the best return rate (and consequently highest PPD) you really only need to concern yourself with a few simple things. Most of this is coming straight from my recent personal experience helped along by Snow Crash and some other users at the GPUGRID forums (mainly the first 3 items are my experience, to a lesser extent for some of the later points)


1. Set the appropriate task length for the cards in your machine. According to current FAQ http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread....rap=true#21666, there are 2 choices: short or long. In order to qualify for a 50% points bonus, the task needs to be reported within 24 hours, and within 48 hours for a 25% bonus. Current long tasks can take well over 48 hours to complete on GT 240 or lesser cards. For comparison my GTX 650 is averaging ~18-20 hours for long tasks.

2. Make sure your cache is set low enough. You don't want to download a new task when you still have several hours remaining on the task in progress. Consider a cache of between 0.05 and 0.3 days in BOINC preferences. This will help return completed tasks within the 24 or 48 bonus period which starts as soon as the task is downloaded to your machine. This is practically a non-issue for current gen fast cards though, since the project only allows 2 tasks per GPU regardless of cache setting. I have found that a low cache I.E. 0.01 may sometimes result in idle time between uploading a completed task and downloading the next task.

3. Set up BOINC to report completed tasks immediately. Create or modify cc_config.xml to include the setting. Read the post http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post4493060 if you are unsure. Disregard the section about SWAN_SYNC in that post. If you do not set up to report immediately, the reporting could be delayed several hours waiting for the project server to connect to your machine for results.


From what I can tell, these 3 items should give you nearly the maximum output for your system. To squeeze out the last few percent there are some other things to do.

There is no longer any need or use to enable the SWAN_SYNC variable. This is handled internally by the application (acemd).

Keeping 1 free core (physical or virtual/HT) per gpu is still recommended AFAIK, and can increase GPU utilization a few percent depending on the system hardware.

Depending on your specific GPU it may return results faster using an older driver (specificaly from the CUDA version used). From what I can tell this would apply to any GPUs less than Fermi but I would like some clarification.

I hope this is helpful to at least 1 person currently, but at least it may help for any new users joining our team.