Ah-Hoy AMD users!!! Logic Labs Bots Going On Auto Pilot

[Logic Labs]

So here the deal Ive picked 10 worthy projects set them to equal priority and cut loose about 25 bots i don't know how effective they will be but they are linked to to the team name. After a few conversations with dirk which led to lots of research i have already shut down a large portion of my grid due to poor credits.Ive started testing a few configuration but the testing has been complicated by an unstable bam account that i cant seem to correct so all of my non local computers have been cut loose. I think that it will be interesting to see what they do anyway! Im waiting for a new cpu id at the moment when i synced my local computers to my new bam account it still downloaded the work load from the old one ???????Dont Know?????? I have uninstalled boinc cleared the temp files. In a few more hrs Ill see if they will sync up right! these two machines have also just been reconfigured (Thanks Again Dirk) so it will be interesting to see how they do.

NerdLifeAMD


Oh yea one more thing opinions welcome please!!!!

so dirk and i had discussed core to ram or in this case thread to ram ratio I have a Dual Xeon Blade that has just been sitting.No kidding sitting in the shed amongst the P2s and P3s you ..... the bone yard.I figured HEY intel Xeons are suppose to be good at doing one thing at a time like a mindless drone and Dual 3.2 HT (2x3.2 /4) that should work well. To my suprise only 500 Credits A day not really worth running. Turns out its only got 512megs of ram per thread.I does have 6 More slots for ram. This ram configuration on this board sucks it only takes ecc and the notch is offset from normal DDR2 so is it worth the price about 150 for 6 more gigs or should i take that 150 and get a new board and cpu just to crunch on i mean i can get a quad core from newegg for like 100 bucks and im sure i can get a am3 board for 50 bucks i have some hard core intel friends who are always ...Xeons man Xeons are the bomb....if i invest in the ram am i going to be impressed over a $150 setup? The only thing that i have not tried is turning the HT off so that it will be 1gb per core instead??? Opinions Opinions Opinions???

[Dirk Broer]

Look on eBay for additional RAM for your machine! Much cheaper than the normal retail channel.
Sometimes it is even cheaper to bid through whatever channel on a second-hand server, if only just for the RAM and perhaps the disks/disk controller.
Have you already tried CPU-Z to see what Xeon's you've got? Then we can check their potential effectiveness through WuProp. Might be that you are better off with a more modern mobo, but that's not sure yet.
Looking at your BAM! host stats, column 'Average credit', at least one configuration used for the Xeons is amongst your more effective boxes. The same box under the Column 'Total credit' has it on top, used this month for NumberFields.
Cheapest all-new cruncher I can think off is a MSI A55 FM2 mobo with an AMD Athlon II X4 740 and 2x 4 GB of RAM, around $150 for the lot. The Athlon II X4 is in this case a Trinity with a disabled/disfunctional GPU part, so it supports all present instruction sets. For double the money you can buy a A10 APU, which has quite a decent GPU on board. More money on the mobo gets you one with an A75 or A85 chipset with more capabilities, RAID, USB3 and SATA3 wise. The top FM2 mobos support up to three graphic cards, and that's where the credits are with BOINC, GPU (sub)projects.

[Logic Labs]

sorry for the delay dirk. that whole life thing getting in my way. anyway yes the xeon did do well comparatively however thats running 24 7 no interruptions wile many of my other crunchers also serve as file servers i don't know if streaming data counts as use and will suspend the client ..... i wouldn't think so but hey its windows who knows and there is no way to see if they are running wile streaming until i hook up a monitor and enable the screensaver which i will get around to .I did run cpuz and everest to get a better picture of what im dealing with. i did not however get a chance to take a snip it. its offline at the moment but i will do so ASAP. also i realized that it LOOKS like its a shared memory bank. wile the optron server has independent banks. I have 2 celeron Ds comming on line tonight my cpu id seems to have updated.as soon as its all inline I Only Going to attach the two Ds and the blade and run for 24 hrs to get some numbers. if the blade does not at least keep up with the Ds with the lack of memory it will be going to an inner city middle school if it seems to be doing the job i can traide out a 3TB seagate for the ram ..Cheers


All that being said most likely what i will be doing is investing in a rack and some 3 or 4 u cases im not sure ? whatever a desktop bored will fit in im not at a shortage for space and if i can only get 5 3 or 4 u blades in a rack thats fine compared to the price of one u equipment .... which brings me to yet another question my friend full of knowledge?. ok so i never really bought into the cross fire stuff the benchmarks i saw at the time were an increase but far from a 100% gain in fact what i saw was less and less of a percentage (FPS and yes framlimit off)gain with every card added i mean yea it was neat to see WOW and Quake run at 200 fps but big woop they say you cant see framerate over like 35 but us nerds can see chop till about 70 fps (frankly i was never wowed by XBOX PS3 Graphics and resolution i had already been seing those things in the PC word) for years....but this was years ago when PCI-E was still new i dont even think there was anything faster then 8X. is it worth it these days to get a board that supports 4 cards or 3 +apu? I do understand the gaming aspect of it with each card being responsible for a different scan line but as far as crunching does it matter that much to have a second or third or fourth card as oppose to having those cards in independent systems ? Over the next 3 months i will be for sure building 4-5 identical systems just to crunch on for my own amusement to put in the rack at the moment im leaning toward the unlock-able black edition quad core . ive had no issues unlocking to hex and OC to 4.2 stable but it has been about 6 months since ive bought one i think they were about 120 on new egg last time i looked. and man i hate to bug you with another question. most of the time when looking for video cards im looking for the most pipelines if im looking with the soul purpose of crunching should i be most concerned with pipelines,Ram Amount,Or gpu frequency?

current schedule as follows

3 weeks research

4th Rack ( no idea what brand to look at the one i have now is a dell half rack) depending on what i can find i may just have one built i have access to the material and people with the skills required but it would end up competently steel and thats going to be heavy

5th Cases do believe it will be 5 ( not sure about power supplies just going to have to see whats available cost of PS vrs what i can find case PS combo)

6th 5 Boards ( Love asus but i have had great luck with the biostar core unlocker ) this will also depend on what ive learned about Crossfire / Crunch performance at this point

7th 5 Cpus 4-8 cores

8th 5 sets RAM following the 2gig per WU ( personally i like crucial ive only ever seen two bad sticks ever but ive also been content with gskills price per performance)

9th 5 sets of drives ( side note has anyone seen an increase in performance crunching wise with raid or ssd)? ( i ONLY buy seagate for myself)

10th 5- 20 video cards depending on research at this point (ive had great luck with sapphire but am open to suggestions) i would say ill just get one for each first but i do want to make sure the the brand and chipset match i dont want to be having a hard time finding identical cards down the road this will also depend on what ive decided on boards

11th rack mount router found some nice ones for about 300 but they are Cisco and im still kinda pissed how they ruined the linksys brand

12th power backup/ conditioner the power grid here is sketchy and ive seen a whole rack of servers toasted at once from a spike ( i have no expertise on large units just 1 workstation setups )

that's a realistic schedule according to my finances and time im guessing somewhere around 4-6 thousand us$

any input would be appreciated (im ready to say Fu&k these Xeons ...... by the way i can get these Xeon blades for 100 each with drives but ... i just dont like them ) i almost bought 10 but he wouldn't include a rack

[Dirk Broer]

Lots of questions, so lots of answers.

You do not need the screensaver -it will only eat BOINC recources-, just set the manager to
Activity: Run Always-Use GPU always-Network is always available.
Also use the settings:
Tools-Computing Preferences: thick the three first boxes and set both 'use at most's to 100%
and
Disk and memory usage: Use at most 90% when in use (for those boxes you're not actually working on, otherwise 66%) and 99% when not in use (you might want to be able to control something, some OpenCL projects can really drag your computer under when given the full 100%)

Using GPUs for BOINC can go without Crossfire/SLI, the BOINC manager sees -provided you set your cc_config.xml file- all available GPUs. If you did not set it to use all GPUs, it will pick the best available. I have crunched with a HD 4770, a GT 315 and a GT 9500 in one mobo, just to see if it would work, it did. I hardly ever game, and the games I play do not bother with frame rates. PCIe x16 (4 GB/s) should be much faster than AGP x8 (2 GB/s) though.

Advantages of a 19'' rack is that you can 'pile up' your hardware and you can install extra blowers below and on top.

In general you can say that the more cores/threads a CPU has, the more effective it will be in BOINC, both credit and power-bill wise. If your Xeon mobo has two CPUs in it that both are capable to run 4 threads there's no reason to ditch it -yet. If the two Xeons together only manage 4 threads they might be quite old, lacking instruction sets and it becomes much more complicated, especially since they might require more ECC RAM (DDR1, DDR2) to be able to perform. How much bang do you want for your buck?

For the GPU: In general Ati/AMD cards perform much better when you look at the amount of GFlops per Watt, but the latest nVidia cards (600 and 700 series) have some models that compare much better to Ati/AMDs offerings, and sometimes even surpassing them. In general you can use anything above 5700, 6600 and 7700 from Ati/AMD, except for those projects that will only take nVidia. For those projects be sure to buy at least a GeForce GTX model.

[Logic Labs]

[QUOTE=Dirk Broer;76001]Lots of questions, so lots of answers.


You do not need the screensaver -it will only eat BOINC recources-, just set the manager to
Activity: Run Always-Use GPU always-Network is always available.

there are no stupid questions only stupid people lol

the point of the screen saver on the two crunchers that serve as part time file server for the kids to watch shows is/was so i can wait for boinc to kick on the screen saver then access the hard drive from one of the media center computers to see if it interrupts .... they don't have screens attached on them normaly <<< that Make More sense>>>? i leave them on a 3 min idle trigger. this way if i need to remote desktop into them boinc pauses this way im not waiting 5 min to log in <<<does that make sense

[Logic Labs]

yea dirk they only have 2 threads per chip ill get that cpuz snapshot here shortly ive always preferred ATI even before AMD bought them in my opinion both companies put out some very nice gpus the big issue for me as a tech is most of my old ati cards are stillll kickin. and most of the old g force and quarto cards are not. I don't remember what card it is id have to dig it out but i even have a old ati card with dual gpus that works fine..............For xp and it will run on 7 with one gpu disabled. that being said there are no 3d drivers at all for these quarto 4 cards that were like 1000 bucks when they were new. i got them from a friend who does graphic rendering and he swears by them and ive seen the stats on them they are impressive ...if your still running xp. you know i really do like xp , i hate vista , 7 just hit its stride a few years ago. Im trying to avoid win8 as much as possible till its gone shouldn't be long now . anyway as much as i like xp i dont miss blue screens. and thats not worth dealing with just to have 3d support. shame on you dirk for even suggesting a nvida card to me lol.... ive got ebay crap to do got some of these g4 ibooks going i might even keep one for browsing they are actually really nice for just hanging on the net and the 8 year old battery's last twice as long as the ones in most of the never pc laptops ive dealt with lately (not counting 8 celled netbooks ) anyway way far from the point and maybe i just need to read over your post again to make sure you did not answer this question indirectly. with the added gpu by that i mean a second whats the increase for example this is what i use to see in benches for games 1st GPU 100% 2nd 75% 3rd 50% 4th 25% for a total of 250% out of four cards instead of 400% does this apply to the crunching as well or are you guys seeing 200% out of 2 cards ((((( THANKS AS ALWAYS DIRK ILL NAME MY NEXT SON AFTER YOU LOL )))


i hate to be a pain in the butt i know i can just hit google im a slacker

[Dirk Broer]

I don't remember what card it is id have to dig it out but i even have a old ati card with dual gpus that works fine..............For xp and it will run on 7 with one gpu disabled.

Did you try a cc_config.xml in the C:\ProgramData\Boinc directory (Win7 keeps it's BOINC data in another directory than WinXP) containing the line "<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>" ? I bet it will use two from then on.

example: (copy using notepad, save the file as cc_config.xml in the C:\ProgramData\Boinc directory)

<cc_config>
   <options>
       <use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
   </options>
</cc_config>

that being said there are no 3d drivers at all for these quarto 4 cards that were like 1000 bucks when they were new. i got them from a friend who does graphic rendering and he swears by them and ive seen the stats on them they are impressive ...if your still running xp.

Try these WinXP 64-bit nVidia Quadro drivers, should be up-to-date, even on older Quadro's.

And yes, using two video cards in one system will double the BOINC GPU credit output (in case both cards are equally able). All my APU systems have an additional HD 6670 at the moment, in the future I will have two cards in each APU system and if possible even three.

[Terry1953]

Did you try a cc_config.xml in the C:\ProgramData\Boinc directory (Win7 keeps it's BOINC data in another directory than WinXP) containing the line "<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>" ? I bet it will use two from then on.

example: (copy using notepad, save the file as cc_config.xml in the C:\ProgramData\Boinc directory)

<cc_config>
   <options>
       <use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
   </options>
</cc_config>

Try these WinXP 64-bit nVidia Quadro drivers, should be up-to-date, even on older Quadro's.

And yes, using two video cards in one system will double the BOINC GPU credit output (in case both cards are equally able). All my APU systems have an additional HD 6670 at the moment, in the future I will have two cards in each APU system and if possible even three.

Dirk does this mean that I can toss this 6670 that is laying on my desk in one of my machines with another card already in it without slowing down the other card?

[Dirk Broer]

Yep, as long as you have the line 'use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus' in the cc_config.xml and that file is in the right directory.
You might have to install drivers for that card perhaps, though for all its faults Windows does a remarkable job at recognising -and using- hardware.
Avoid mixing nVidia and Ati/AMD cards though, as nVidia sees it fit to disable the PhysX then.
(strangely enough this does not apply mixing APUs with nVidia cards, the APU gets PhysX then! -at least: according to GPU-Z)

[Logic Labs]

Oh snap..........