Folding @ Home cpu vs gpu

[stevemenendez]

I am taking a very early look at running a folding box, I was wondering if I should chase higher end CPUs or GPUs for price to performance. 

[blackmage1134]

GPU all the way for Folding, CPU does help but barely compared to a good GPU, i rock a i5 6600 (only wish i got the overclockable one) got a 960 4gb card does good but i wanna go to a 1060 

[Daniel Z.]

CPU is way worse than GPU

[Uzume]

You also need some CPU capacity to drive your GPU. So if you let a Boinc project saturate your CPU at 100% then your GPU is going to be starved and drastically under perform.

 

Not sure about about Folding@H, but with Seti@H I set the "Use at most % of CPUs" setting to 75% percent to allow the GPUs some capacity to stretch their legs. 

[Daniel Z.]

6 minutes ago, zzrhardy said:

You also need some CPU capacity to drive your GPU. So if you let a Boinc project saturate your CPU at 100% then your GPU is going to be starved and drastically under perform.

 

Not sure about about Folding@H, but with Seti@H I set the "Use at most % of CPUs" setting to 75% percent to allow the GPUs some capacity to stretch their legs. 

I am pretty sure they are independantly used in F@H.

[Uzume]

4 hours ago, Daniel Z. said:

I am pretty sure they are independantly used in F@H.

Each GPU work unit in Seti@H requires 0.229 CPU as well - if it can't get it smoothly it will bottleneck the GPU's. Ie, for me each GPU does a work unit in 5-6 min tops, but if I let the CPU be 100% maxed out then each GPU work unit then takes between 25 to 35 min.

 

Likely to be completely different in Folding@H. I think Seti@H is the grand daddy of Boinc projects so it might be less sophisticated.

[Ithanul]

14 hours ago, zzrhardy said:

Each GPU work unit in Seti@H requires 0.229 CPU as well - if it can't get it smoothly it will bottleneck the GPU's. Ie, for me each GPU does a work unit in 5-6 min tops, but if I let the CPU be 100% maxed out then each GPU work unit then takes between 25 to 35 min.

 

Likely to be completely different in Folding@H. I think Seti@H is the grand daddy of Boinc projects so it might be less sophisticated.

Yep, depending on BOINC project, some CPU cycles are used because the GPU needs the CPU to help feed it.

This behavior is also the reason to keep a thread or two open for GPUs while folding.

 

CPU still currently produces less than a good GPU.

Though, I am testing some of the new a7 units for CPUs.  Looks like Standford finally bringing back some good units for CPUs.  Still not to the levels of the bigadv units, but better than the past units of late.

 

To give you a shot of an a7 unit.

5960X at setting 8 on its threads.  Around 4.4GHz on the cores.  Though, I did get a rare mystery unit (no one sure what the unit is yet) some folders are reporting when I was setting 6 on threads (the output was super nice).  Some folders on the other forum I frequent are soon going to do some test runs with their CPUs to get more data points on these new units.

 

Hopefully when I get the threadripper (a 1900X) from a trade I am doing.  I can do some test runs on one of those under Linux.

[foldinghomealone]

I would fold with NV GPUs only due to efficiency. Consider one thread per GPU plus one for OS