LTT Official Folding Month V (2022)

[BondiBlue]

17 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

My 90W 1660Ti mobile can do 1.8M on a good day, if it weren't limited by thermals

Lmao, that makes me feel bad about my desktop 1660 Ti. It only gets about 1.3M PPD on average, and that's while running louder than the RTX 3080 I've got in another machine.

[Gorgon]

34 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

The 3050ti (85w) in my laptop and the 480 (125w) I have are about the same Passmark performance, 480 scores about 600k PPD, 3050ti scores 1.2-1.3M PPD. Talk about different architectures and architectural improvements.

That difference is more likely due to the 3050 using CUDA and the 480 OpenCL. NVIDIA made major improvements to CUDA during COVID that added about 1 1.4x performance increase for F@H. AMD, on the other hand, is pretty much ignoring OpenCL and focusing on ROCM for the enterprise.

 

This is the reason why most people Folding run NVIDA as an NVIDIA Card will vastly out-perform an AMD one with similar theoretical FP32 TFLOPs performance.

 

In BOINC some AMD cards, however, are beasts as their FP64 throughput hasn't been intentionally gimped.

[BiotechBen]

41 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

An 85W 3050Ti only does 1.2-1.3M PPD? My 90W 1660Ti mobile can do 1.8M on a good day, if it weren't limited by thermals

Not limited by thermals, runs a chilly 74C average according to HWINFO64, although only drawing 74W. Way overbuilt cooler for GPU and way underbuilt for CPU (pegged at 100C)

 

[rkv_2401]

The government back home quietly doubled the price of electricity for the highest slab, and I just started folding on those rigs again a month ago...so guess who got an electricity bill 3.5x of what it usually is...:))

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

The government back home quietly doubled the price of electricity for the highest slab, and I just started folding on those rigs again a month ago...so guess who got an electricity bill 3.5x of what it usually is...:))

Darn, did the electricity company not warn you when the price went up?

[rkv_2401]

3 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Darn, did the electricity company not warn you when the price went up?

It's state-run, they couldn't care less. If you forget to pay the bill, they don't call you or anything, just show up at your doorstep ready to pull the plug (but to be fair, they'll usually give you a few days to pay the bill after that before actually disconnecting it)

[rkv_2401]

I've been wishing I'd convinced my parents to go solar in 2019, the panels would have paid themselves back in a couple of years' time. But it's an apartment complex and there's no space to mount the solar panels

[rkv_2401]

30 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Lmao, that makes me feel bad about my desktop 1660 Ti. It only gets about 1.3M PPD on average, and that's while running louder than the RTX 3080 I've got in another machine.

Really? That's quite surprising because I almost never run my 1660Ti above 1560Mhz, usually only at 1365Mhz (a full 650Mhz below what it's capable of) and I still got 1.1-1.4M PPD back in those days. But you said you didn't want to bother overclocking/undervolting etc, right?

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

It's state-run, they couldn't care less. If you forget to pay the bill, they don't call you or anything, just show up at your doorstep ready to pull the plug (but to be fair, they'll usually give you a few days to pay the bill after that before actually disconnecting it)

Its sad that then people use this sort of thing as examples of why state-run is bad, when its entirely a choice of the given state on if they run it for the people or rip their residents off.  In reality we often lose regardless if its state or private because the people running both are corrupt.

[rkv_2401]

5 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Its sad that then people use this sort of thing as examples of why state-run is bad, when its entirely a choice of the given state on if they run it for the people or rip their residents off.  In reality we often lose regardless if its state or private because the people running both are corrupt.

I'm a big fan of my state's electricity board, they keep the power running despite insane cyclones, mild floods and all sorts of things and we are (tied) first in the percentage of power generated by renewables across India. But sometimes they show their ugly draconian "state-run" heads. They've kept electricity very affordable for so long (I was paying 8 cents per kWh up until 2 months ago), and I'm actually okay with the price hike, I just wish they'd communicated this better.

[BondiBlue]

3 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

Really? That's quite surprising because I almost never run my 1660Ti above 1560Mhz, usually only at 1365Mhz (a full 650Mhz below what it's capable of) and I still got 1.1-1.4M PPD back in those days. 

It's an extremely low end 1660 Ti - picture (not mine) below. The VRAM quite literally has zero cooling - the chips don't touch the heatsink. The heatsink itself isn't very large, and it only has a single fan cooling the entire thing. It doesn't run too hot (the die itself, anyway), but it's very loud. I can't complain though since I bought it in September 2021 brand new for only $75 - this exact model was going for several hundred on eBay at the time. I recall seeing sold listings for $400 or more. Silly for what it is, but I didn't pay that much. 

 

7 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

But you said you didn't want to bother overclocking/undervolting etc, right?

On this card I actually would be interested in modifying some of the settings. Haven't had time yet, but maybe I'll do that before folding month. But yes, I do usually run my GPUs at stock or near stock settings, mostly for the sake of simplicity. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area with relatively low power costs, and with the amount of cards I'm running I really don't use all that much power compared to some people. Besides, I'm one of those folks who actually uses my folding systems for heating in the winter months. The heat has already started to come in handy over the past couple weeks. 

[BiotechBen]

26 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

It's an extremely low end 1660 Ti - picture (not mine) below. The VRAM quite literally has zero cooling - the chips don't touch the heatsink. The heatsink itself isn't very large, and it only has a single fan cooling the entire thing. It doesn't run too hot (the die itself, anyway), but it's very loud. I can't complain though since I bought it in September 2021 brand new for only $75 - this exact model was going for several hundred on eBay at the time. I recall seeing sold listings for $400 or more. Silly for what it is, but I didn't pay that much. 

 

On this card I actually would be interested in modifying some of the settings. Haven't had time yet, but maybe I'll do that before folding month. But yes, I do usually run my GPUs at stock or near stock settings, mostly for the sake of simplicity. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area with relatively low power costs, and with the amount of cards I'm running I really don't use all that much power compared to some people. Besides, I'm one of those folks who actually uses my folding systems for heating in the winter months. The heat has already started to come in handy over the past couple weeks. 

For my heating needs, if it's above 16C out for more than 2 days I have to open a window.

[justpoet]

48 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

I've been wishing I'd convinced my parents to go solar in 2019, the panels would have paid themselves back in a couple of years' time. But it's an apartment complex and there's no space to mount the solar panels

Consider something akin to a homemade Jackery where you can power it from a solar panel and/or a wall plug, and then run off of that.  No code compliance to deal with.  Just set the panels in the sun on a balcony, deck, sliding door, or sunny window.

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, justpoet said:

Consider something akin to a homemade Jackery where you can power it from a solar panel and/or a wall plug, and then run off of that.  No code compliance to deal with.  Just set the panels in the sun on a balcony, deck, sliding door, or sunny window.

Thought about that myself, but it seems a hassle unless you also have an automatic switch to go back to the grid when the battery runs out.  Also you get relatively small panels for the price and at least for me the trees are overgrown to the north so block the sun below the roofline.

[Shlouski]

Oops............... it's a feature, well ventilated side panel:

 

 

Just waiting on that riser.

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 minute ago, Shlouski said:

Oops............... it's a feature, well ventilated side panel:

 

 

Argh, that's what worries me about having a tempered glass side panel as they're known to spontaneously shatter.

[dogwitch]

at one point i had 5 rx 580s,2 2080,`1  2080s,a 2070. by god it was boinc,folding monsters set up.

but i sold all the 580 for a profit and same goes with fe 2080 super.

[rkv_2401]

5 hours ago, justpoet said:

Consider something akin to a homemade Jackery where you can power it from a solar panel and/or a wall plug, and then run off of that.  No code compliance to deal with.  Just set the panels in the sun on a balcony, deck, sliding door, or sunny window.

I do still consider that, but as @Alex Atkin UK says you don't get much solar panel for the price and the problem with our flat is not that we consume too much electricity, it's that there's some janky-ass wiring situation going on and we get ridiculous bills compared to our neighbors (this time we got 50x that of a certain thrifty neighbor's!!). Even the difference between how much electricity we calculate we consume and how much we actually consume is shockingly large. The only real solution to this would be to re-do all the wiring, go fully solar and produce more than we consume for a net negative draw from the grid.

[Alex Atkin UK]

57 minutes ago, rkv_2401 said:

I do still consider that, but as @Alex Atkin UK says you don't get much solar panel for the price and the problem with our flat is not that we consume too much electricity, it's that there's some janky-ass wiring situation going on and we get ridiculous bills compared to our neighbors (this time we got 50x that of a certain thrifty neighbor's!!). Even the difference between how much electricity we calculate we consume and how much we actually consume is shockingly large. The only real solution to this would be to re-do all the wiring, go fully solar and produce more than we consume for a net negative draw from the grid.

That's odd, wiring shouldn't be able to make any difference like that.  Have you checked there isn't something like a water heater constantly running?  I'd want to know there isn't something running off your power that there shouldn't be.

[rkv_2401]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That's odd, wiring shouldn't be able to make any difference like that.  Have you checked there isn't something like a water heater constantly running?  I'd want to know there isn't something running off your power that there shouldn't be.

The only things constantly running are a fridge and the DVR. Power measured vs calculated is off by at least 200-300 units in a given month and I've never figured out why (even after including an abnormally high level of usage for the water heaters). But there's definitely a bigger problem with the wiring that kills all the electronics, and that's the much bigger expense tbh. We've lost 4 (all 4 of them being expensive Plasmas) TVs in the last 15 years, and that average would be worse if it wasn't for the recent LED TV that's kept it together for the last 5 years..thankfully it does eff all to PCs

[BiotechBen]

8 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That's odd, wiring shouldn't be able to make any difference like that.  Have you checked there isn't something like a water heater constantly running?  I'd want to know there isn't something running off your power that there shouldn't be.

I remember reading an article that was related to water usage, the one Tennant was the first in a manifold but it was hooked up with theirs as the input of the manifold instead of the output and were being charged for everyone's water usage. Makes me wonder if something similar is happening with @rkv_2401

[BiotechBen]

6 hours ago, rkv_2401 said:

The only things constantly running are a fridge and the DVR. Power measured vs calculated is off by at least 200-300 units in a given month and I've never figured out why (even after including an abnormally high level of usage for the water heaters). But there's definitely a bigger problem with the wiring that kills all the electronics, and that's the much bigger expense tbh. We've lost 4 (all 4 of them being expensive Plasmas) TVs in the last 15 years, and that average would be worse if it wasn't for the recent LED TV that's kept it together for the last 5 years..thankfully it does eff all to PCs

I'd say it might be worth getting an inexpensive UPC for your sensitive electronics.

[GOTSpectrum]

1 minute ago, Schnoz said:

This is why I'm going with a metal side panel. I'm going to be carrying my computer around a lot, so it needs to be able to survive at least some light punishment. Also, it's better in terms of EMI.

you can also add fans if needed easily

[BondiBlue]

I decided to get a couple more RX 580s for folding month. Just ordered two from eBay, both 4GB models. One is from XFX ($80) and the other is another Sapphire Pulse card ($83).

 

I still have the RTX 3080 that I've had for the past month or so, and if things don't change this week I might end up having it for at least part of folding month. 

[GOTSpectrum]

5 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

I decided to get a couple more RX 580s for folding month. Just ordered two from eBay, both 4GB models. One is from XFX ($80) and the other is another Sapphire Pulse card ($83).

 

I still have the RTX 3080 that I've had for the past month or so, and if things don't change this week I might end up having it for at least part of folding month.