LTT Official Folding Month V (2022)

[BiotechBen]

2 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Have you got a passkey? 

Yup.

Also, is there a way to configure the F@H client to tell it that it's okay to go balls to the wall on CPU? Currently hitting a hard wall just under 90W on my 2600x, but with video encoding in blender it'll suck back 112W happily.

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, BiotechBen said:

Yup.

I suspect in a few WUs you will see that PPD go up a fair amount... Give me one min to check the database 

[Alex Atkin UK]

30 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Looked up the energy useage per foot of my baseboard heaters, and my 480 and 2600X may be slightly more efficient per heat unit. 

My baseboards are ~150-200Wh per linear foot, and given the weather here being chilly: the total linear feet of the baseboards comes out slightly more than running ~250ish watts of CPU+GPU for 24/7 operation.

Technically nothing is going to be as efficient (cost / energy consumption wise) at converting electricity to heat as an actual heater, but I do think generating heat while curing diseases is making more efficient use of energy.

[BiotechBen]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

Technically nothing is going to be as efficient (cost / energy consumption wise) at converting electricity to heat as an actual heater, but I do think generating heat while curing diseases is making more efficient use of energy.

I've got old shitty electric baseboards, they're SUPER inefficient at converting heat, but if I can save few watts per day helping cure disease, I'll jump in head first.

[BiotechBen]

3 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I suspect in a few WUs you will see that PPD go up a fair amount... Give me one min to check the database 

Is up to 73.5K with a little tuning now.

[GOTSpectrum]

2 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I suspect in a few WUs you will see that PPD go up a fair amount... Give me one min to check the database 

So thanks to the silly way AMD label their cards I can't tell, but I would think 400k is not unrealistic

 

2 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Technically nothing is going to be as efficient (cost / energy consumption wise) at converting electricity to heat as an actual heater, but I do think generating heat while curing diseases is making more efficient use of energy.

I mean, a gpu just converts 90% of the power into heat... the rest gets transferred into movement and airflow which through friction turns into... you guessed it, heat! so it's about as efficient in reality. The difference is marginal  

[BiotechBen]

7 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

So thanks to the silly way AMD label their cards I can't tell, but I would think 400k is not unrealistic

So based on what F@H says:

GPU:10:0 Ellesmere XT [RADEON RX 470/480/570/580]

CPU:11 

And point value of current project is 26702

 

 

->Just switched drop-down to High Priority

 

Would it help to change workload in RADEON settings to Compute?

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

So thanks to the silly way AMD label their cards I can't tell, but I would think 400k is not unrealistic

 

I mean, a gpu just converts 90% of the power into heat... the rest gets transferred into movement and airflow which through friction turns into... you guessed it, heat! so it's about as efficient in reality. The difference is marginal  

I did literally keep the house warm (well technically prevent it getting too cold) all last winter, although gas heating is a lot cheaper but has no bragging rights.

[BondiBlue]

15 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Is up to 73.5K with a little tuning now.

Just give it some time before messing with a bunch of settings. The first few WUs usually don't give many points, but after it gets settled it'll give more. My dual RX 570 machine usually gets around 800K PPD at stock settings on both cards. Also, CPU folding while GPU folding on the same machine can lead to reduced PPD. I don't use CPU folding on any machine that also has a GPU. In theory the cores should be used such that one core will stay free for the GPU, but it doesn't always work. 

[BiotechBen]

2 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Just give it some time before messing with a bunch of settings. The first few WUs usually don't give many points, but after it gets settled it'll give more. My dual RX 570 machine usually gets around 800K PPD at stock settings on both cards. Also, CPU folding while GPU folding on the same machine can lead to reduced PPD. I don't use CPU folding on any machine that also has a GPU. In theory the cores should be used such that one core will stay free for the GPU, but it doesn't always work. 

F@H says that it's using 11/12 cores for CPU folding so I'm good for that. Also doubting the ETA for this project, it's done 21% in an hour and says that there's 8hrs remaining. XFX also see the base settings on the particular card I have super conservatively, the settings I've tweaked I have run on heavy workloads without crashes routinely.

[justpoet]

1 minute ago, BiotechBen said:

F@H says that it's using 11/12 cores for CPU folding so I'm good for that. Also doubting the ETA for this project, it's done 21% in an hour and says that there's 8hrs remaining.

Yeah, let it run for several days and it'll settle in to get much better at predicting times and point outcomes on your machine.

[BiotechBen]

Just now, justpoet said:

Yeah, let it run for several days and it'll settle in to get much better at predicting times and point outcomes on your machine.

CPU C2 T0 is sitting happily at 2.0 ghz idle for the GPU render.

[GOTSpectrum]

3 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

F@H says that it's using 11/12 cores for CPU folding so I'm good for that. Also doubting the ETA for this project, it's done 21% in an hour and says that there's 8hrs remaining. XFX also see the base settings on the particular card I have super conservatively, the settings I've tweaked I have run on heavy workloads without crashes routinely.

You should have 2 cores free for windows and general usage and a core free per GPU 

[BiotechBen]

1 minute ago, GOTSpectrum said:

You should have 2 cores free for windows and general usage and a core free per GPU 

Since I got a similarly powerful gaming laptop, I haven't been using the desktop very much except for Plex ripping and then transferring to my old laptop Plex server. Windows can be laggy AF for all I care on the machine.

[justpoet]

2 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

CPU C2 T0 is sitting happily at 2.0 ghz idle for the GPU render.

CPU usage varies a lot for GPU work units...both from unit to unit, and even during an individual unit.  General rule of thumb is to keep at LEAST one PHYSICAL CORE free per GPU folding.  Plus whatever you expect to use for windows/chrome tabs/etc.  I CPU only, since I'm either in linux without GPUs in the system, or on Mac where GPUs don't fold thanks to lack of support.  But the afore mentioned guidelines should help you out.

[BondiBlue]

3 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

F@H says that it's using 11/12 cores for CPU folding so I'm good for that. 

Yes, that's what I said it should do. Still, depending on your setup you might do better by disabling CPU folding and just using GPU folding. If it doesn't hurt the GPU score on your system then great, but I've seen it on plenty of machines before. If you do use CPU folding then I'd recommend using less cores for folding. You shouldn't have only one core free for the entire system. 

5 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Also doubting the ETA for this project, it's done 21% in an hour and says that there's 8hrs remaining.

The ETA is almost always useless at the very beginning. Just give it some time to settle out before paying too much attention to it. 

6 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

XFX also see the base settings on the particular card I have super conservatively, the settings I've tweaked I have run on heavy workloads without crashes routinely.

Folding doesn't always behave the same as other heavy workloads, so make sure your settings are stable for folding as well. Settings that work for other things don't always work for folding over time. 

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, BiotechBen said:

Since I got a similarly powerful gaming laptop, I haven't been using the desktop very much except for Plex ripping and then transferring to my old laptop Plex server. Windows can be laggy AF for all I care on the machine.

You are not understanding, if you don't leave a couple cores free it will reduce your GPUs PPD massively. In my experiments by as much as 60%

[justpoet]

1 minute ago, BiotechBen said:

Since I got a similarly powerful gaming laptop, I haven't been using the desktop very much except for Plex ripping and then transferring to my old laptop Plex server. Windows can be laggy AF for all I care on the machine.

It isn't about making Windows laggy.  It is that having the cores all in use actually throttles the GPU work units when they need to transfer things around or crunch a bit on the processor to enable more GPU processing.

[BiotechBen]

4 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Yes, that's what I said it should do. Still, depending on your setup you might do better by disabling CPU folding and just using GPU folding. If it doesn't hurt the GPU score on your system then great, but I've seen it on plenty of machines before. If you do use CPU folding then I'd recommend using less cores for folding. You shouldn't have only one core free for the entire system. 

The ETA is almost always useless at the very beginning. Just give it some time to settle out before paying too much attention to it. 

Folding doesn't always behave the same as other heavy workloads, so make sure your settings are stable for folding as well. Settings that work for other things don't always work for folding over time. 

Good to know, I'm not even particularly close to running my GPU near the redline, it's at like a 50mhz boost over the stock boost, and haven't touched the mem boost since I read on a few threads that it doesn't affect the results much. 

Also just realized that was the CPU render time and stats. I may just stop it because it's not doing very much and is at least half the performance of the GPU.

[BondiBlue]

Just now, BiotechBen said:

Good to know, I'm not even particularly close to running my GPU near the redline, it's at like a 50mhz boost over the stock boost, and haven't touched the mem boost since I read on a few threads that it doesn't affect the results much. 

Personally I just run almost all of my folding cards at stock settings (except for fan speeds on some), and I've had excellent luck with reliability. One of my RX 570s has been in use for folding since 2017, and it's still running strong today. I tried overclocking it a bit for folding once and ended up losing a ton of points despite the card being stable otherwise. 

[BiotechBen]

5 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

You are not understanding, if you don't leave a couple cores free it will reduce your GPUs PPD massively. In my experiments by as much as 60%

Gonna probably disable the CPU folding, it's not contributing very much, or may take it down to low power. @justpoet

[GOTSpectrum]

Just now, BiotechBen said:

Gonna probably disable the CPU folding, it's not contributing very much, or may take it down to low power. @justpoet

if you put the client into low power it will disable GPU folding if thats what you mean 

[BiotechBen]

2 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

if you put the client into low power it will disable GPU folding if thats what you mean 

So how do I have it use fewer cores?

I can toggle between GPU and CPU folding tabs, so would having the CPU not at full power help?

[GOTSpectrum]

4 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

So how do I have it use fewer cores?

I can toggle between GPU and CPU folding tabs, so would having the CPU not at full power help?

you need to use the advanced control panel. Type fahcontrol into the start menu 

[GOTSpectrum]

Once there go to configure in the top left, slots, then you can remove or edit the CPU slot there