SLI mode for folding?

[lexidobe]

Hello everyone, I have recently added 2 GTX 960's I had laying around to my main system to fold on in addition to my main graphics card. My question is if I should be running these cards in SLI to get maximum folding performance or if I should run them independently, if it even matters. The 960's are only in my system to fold on, my monitor is plugged into my 970. Sorry for the dumb question, I'm new to folding and I want to do the most good possible with what I have to work with.

[RollinLower]

even if you run the cards in SLI, they will fold seperately.

so to answer your question, no SLI won't help F@H performance. just keep the cards running as is!

[Esper22]

No allowing each gpu to act independently i believe is by far your best option, each gpu will get its own WU to work on. Make sure to leave enough free CPU threads (4?) available to keep the GPU's well feed with info.

[lexidobe]

Just now, RollinLower said:

even if you run the cards in SLI, they will fold seperately.

so to answer your question, no SLI won't help F@H performance. just keep the cards running as is!

Thank you! Another question. Is it normal for my 970's folding performance to not increase much when overclocked? I have a 970 FTW with an EK block running at 1600 MHz and +400 MHz on the memory and it's still producing around 400,000 points per day either way. 

[Kilrah]

Yes, overclock is pretty insignificant for folding, and often causes issues since no glitches are tolerated so it's best not to. 

[Esper22]

A lot of the times the overclocks can cause WU errors and the result to be rejected, i would not expect more then 10% performance boost for what will be a 50%+ increase in power consumption. Not worth pushing over-clocks in this type of work type, think like the crypto-miners do  Under-clock-Under-volt-More physical GPU's for better efficiency.  

[RollinLower]

2 minutes ago, lexidobe said:

Thank you! Another question. Is it normal for my 970's folding performance to not increase much when overclocked? I have a 970 FTW with an EK block running at 1600 MHz and +400 MHz on the memory and it's still producing around 400,000 points per day either way. 

F@H overclocking is tricky business in my opinion.

 

some WU's have a different load on the card than others. so a GPU that is stable in games could be unstable when F@H at the same frequencies, but only on some WU's. on other WU's it could be perfectly fine.

also, when a WU doesn't like your OC, it isn't very obvious if you're not watching the logs. when unstable, a WU will just retry different parts untill it gets a good computation. in that time you will not gain any points tough, because it is working on the same part for longer than usual. so if you have a OC on your card, sometimes it will even generate less points than a stock card!

 

i always just stick with a very mild OC on my GPU's, for stabilities sake

 

[lexidobe]

1 minute ago, RollinLower said:

F@H overclocking is tricky business in my opinion.

 

some WU's have a different load on the card than others. so a GPU that is stable in games could be unstable when F@H at the same frequencies, but only on some WU's. on other WU's it could be perfectly fine.

also, when a WU doesn't like your OC, it isn't very obvious if you're not watching the logs. when unstable, a WU will just retry different parts untill it gets a good computation. in that time you will not gain any points tough, because it is working on the same part for longer than usual. so if you have a OC on your card, sometimes it will even generate less points than a stock card!

 

i always just stick with a very mild OC on my GPU's, for stabilities sake

 

Oh I didn't realize that, thanks for explaining! I presumed that if it was unstable it would obviously crash like it does in games. That may be my problem. Does FAH benefit from higher VRAM speeds, or only from higher core speeds?

[RollinLower]

6 minutes ago, lexidobe said:

Oh I didn't realize that, thanks for explaining! I presumed that if it was unstable it would obviously crash like it does in games. That may be my problem. Does FAH benefit from higher VRAM speeds, or only from higher core speeds?

both, to some extend. i have my cores stock but a slight WU on my memory. this varies highly between GPU architectures tough. i have a Pascal Titan X that benefits pretty good from core OC, but also a Turing 2080Ti that has almost no effect with core OC but i can push a +700 mem OC no problem.