zooterboy

Ok, here's the situation. I've been folding a while with my sig rig and my laptop (my laptop puts out around 3600 PPD). At the rate I'm folding, My sig rig shows @ 17600 PPD in Fahmon. Adding those together, you get 21,200. I have yet to ever break 20k. I end up spending all my time babysitting both of them to get them to keep folding and it's driving me bat****!

I have yet to find a priority/affinity setting program that will work without manually setting it every time (which kinda defeats the purpose of having a program for that). I've tried setaffinity II, it works about half the time on my laptop, but not on the sig rig, I've used process manager on my sig rig, but only works on one fah_core11, not the other. It also won't allow itself to be installed on my laptop, says there is a memory problem and crashes. I've tried a bunch of others, none yet working.

I'm running vmware ubuntu smp on both rigs and getting decent points, but issues there too. Ubuntu seems to have this issue with hanging every time a unit completes (well, nearly every time) and when you restart it, it deletes your completed WU so that you get no credit for it. I have XP on the laptop and it works better to only use one GPU to fold (not to mention that I can't seem to get control of the second card completely no matter what I try, I'm about to tear my freaking hair out!!) I found a supposed fix on the folding forum, but that doesn't work at all. The script for it doesn't run as it's supposed to, and I am not all that fluent in Linux.

Now I'm getting BSOD on the sig rig with the dreaded nvkklmd (vista ultimate 64) or whatever that Nvidia driver crash is called about every 36 hours running. I'm running 177.92 drivers because they give more points than any other driver out right now. I've tried the newer drivers and they also give that driver crash BSOD, but with lower points. I've lowered the OC on the video cards, but it will eventually crash too. I'm getting no crashes at all on the laptop (I think it's because it's XP). My sig rig never gets over 52C on the CPU while folding, ever. The GPUs have never gotten over 72C.

If I could just get these running to where I didn't have to fix them everytime I walk in the house, I would actually have time to do something for a change!

Questions? Ideas? Suggestions?

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cuy50

Fahmon is not 100% correct. It's normal to get 1-2k less than fahmon. As for your other problems, I have no idea.

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nafljhy

yea.. fahmon isn't as accurate as it used to be because of the new WUs that totally screw with your points. i use setaffinityII and setpriority. i've only set them once and they run in the background. i've changed it around once or twice but other than that. i don't touch them.

you can get both here:
http://www.overclock.net/4246525-post2.html

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zooterboy

Ok, maybe this ended up being a bit more of a rant than anything. I guess I'm curious as to if others are having the amount of problems I am, and I guess you're not...

I have some theories as to what is going on, and maybe someone can give me some feedback. I think my sig rig is drawing more juice than the PSU can put out. From what I can tell, I'm either right at the edge of its output or slightly over running what I have right now (plus I'm OC to hell and gone). I have plans to get a 1k psu in the next month or so, so that should fix the problem and give me headroom for that eventual tri-sli that I know I'm going to end up with.

This laptop video card thing seems to be a unique issue to me, as I've asked around and no one that I've talked to seems to have run into it. When I was running GPU folding on both cards, the second card would downclock regardless of what I did. I even manually turned powermizer off in the registry (all entries) and it didn't work. I'm just about to the point now of doing a bios flash to only allow one speed on the cards, but that's a tricky proposition because this kind of setup involves flashing the second card in a setup that isn't exactly like desktop gpus. I have a flash program from the mfg, if I can figure out how to replace the code with my own, it should be no problem.

I'm feeling a bit better about the whole thing since when I got home tonight I didn't have to fix things again, and it's been a while since that happened.

What is the best way to run smp? Is it using Linux? Do most people run two instances of vmware and assign them to separate cpus? If so, do you assign the GPU folding instances to certain CPUs?

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stingerjg

I run one instance of VMware/Ubuntu smp and one GUP2 on my sig rig. I use Setaffinity II for the smp to limit it to 3 cores. I run my second card in my HTPC, I seem to get more PPD that way.

It sucks that your having problems. The only problem i have is vmware smp gets an error at the end of its run and wont start the next wu.

I hope you get it figured out, you dont want me catching you. Im down one vmware smp and a gpu right now. good luck and fold on.

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455buick

Hi zooterboy,

Just some ramblings and personal experience....

I don't use fahmon, ubuntu or any other third party software. I don't use Windows Vista. Instead I use Windows XP on all of my folding rigs. I use the 177.35 drivers for folding gpu2. Except my main sig rig and my daughter's rig (a lowly P4 at the moment), all of the other rigs are pure folders. Most are overclocked a little.... e.g. Quads and Dual core at 333 fsb or X2's at 210 fsb.

So to your question. When I set up the folding clients I leave everything pretty much stock. I don't mess with affinity, memory usage, etc... I find this to be the most stable, but also a little less in the ppd category. Clients come and go, and some WU/clients "seem" to be more stable. I'll get many weeks of those and then get some different WU's that create all kinds of havoc.... Recently the fah_13 clients are an example. They'll run for a couple of days and then quit with error messages. It can get frustrating, so I feel your pain.

As for your laptop. By design they are limited to heating issues and power issues. So having problems with the folding on that computer, doesn't surprise me too much... Laptops weren't designed to run 24/7 365 days a year.... I know people do it, but again the laptop has a different design parameter.
As for your main rig... The 750W psu, might be underpowered for 2 - GTX 260's, plus everything else. I'm guessing you're pulling about 600-650W. I'm guessing this from these estimates:

M/B - 25W min Add 5W for every USB port you have
Hard drives - 50W (25W each)
CPU - 90-95W (since it's OC'd and folding)
Optical drives - 20W each
(2) GTX 260 - 300-340W (max at 182W each)
Fans - 3-5W each lets say 15W here.
(2) DDR - 6W
Total - 560W est.

Most psu have a 85% duty cycle so 750 x .85 = 637.5W So maybe the power supply is being pushed a little... Just my guess. But like I stated before, recently some WU's "seem" to be a little more un-stable than those in the past.

I hope this helped, :-)

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zooterboy

I appreciate the feedback. I have 3 HDD's so there's an additional 25W there; I have 7 fans, so there's another 20... I guess I'm even closer than I thought. I forgot to factor in the additional power requirements when I got the 260's.

As far as the laptop goes, I'm actually thrilled to be getting what I am with it. It's the principle of it that bothers me, that I bought this thing (and I paid a TON for it) and I'm not allowed to have control over parts of it. Temps are not the issue with the second card downclocking, the way I have it configured the cards never get above 70, even overclocked. The sad thing is, compared to my sig rig, this thing is rock solid as far as durability is concerned. I have this nasty habit of pushing things way too far though, and one of these days I might learn to leave well enough alone. Yeah right, who am I kidding?

Vista is mostly an experiment, plus I'm running the 64 bit version so I can use all the RAM. I'll figure this out yet, maybe I'll make a separate partition just for folding.

New PSU tomorrow, for sure.

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azcrazy

yea naf , i just to use those two programs but once the W/U is done it set's it back to what it was , and no u can't trust fahmon

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