GPU cooling (and return from hiatus)

Okay, so I've been gone from Folding and DC projects for almost two years now (college, work, got married...)

Now, I've put together a nice system (see the Quad in my sig) and I want to put it to good use in both Folding and Rosetta.
My plan so far is to do Folding on the GPU and Rosetta on the CPU exclusively (a timeshare deal on the CPU just works out to too much hassle.)

I don't have my RAM yet (DHL...) so I've been trying to get as prepared as possible. If I'm going to run the GPU client constantly (save for when I'm gaming, right?) should I do anything for better cooling?
I'm not thinking anything as intense as an aftermarket cooler but is it feasible any more to pull the cooler off and apply a different thermal grease/paste on the GPU? (ie Arctic Silver? I've done this way in the past on much older graphics cards...)

Anyway, basically I'm worried about the life of my video card. Since I'm going to be burning the midnight oil on both the GPU and CPU I could just focus on ambient temperatures, right? Get the case cooler and have to worry less about each processor and their coolers...?

Any advice on this would be appreciated from those who have this kind of split (GPU-folding and CPU-BOINC crunching).

EDIT:
I forgot completely to ask if I'm going to see a performance drop by actually running both of these clients in a VM of Gentoo... I want to dual boot Gentoo and Vista x64 and to avoid over-frequent reboots I want to be able to run a VM to continue crunching the same WUs. Good idea for both CPU and GPU or is it going to screw me over?

home !

2 years is a LONG time.

To answer a little bit of your questions.

GPU Cooling, I run a 8800GTS 512 24/7 with Riva Tuner and the fan@ 80% & it is fine.
(like you said - keep ambient temps down & you should be good)

Running GPU & an SMP is possible (in Windows)
but Someone correct me here if I'm wrong.

Shelnutt has a Thread in here about getting GPU to work in Linux.
Not sure if you can run the SMP at the same time or not though. (in VM)

I know you can in Windows. If you polk around I know there are recent threads on the subject.

If you need some help - just post the questions up & I'm sure someone will be along shortly to completely confuse you help out.

Good to see you back!

Hah! Yeah... thankfully OCF has a reputation for being more helpful than "completely confusing" people

EDIT:
Oh wow... I just saw that the GPU2 client runs in WINE on Linux... meh, never mind. No way am I doing that and I'm *definitely* not running WINE within VMWare. *sigh* I guess this means I'll be running Vista x64 only =/

Yeah, but in Windows you can run a SMP client & a GPU client.

Quad Core & GPU.

I think that's like 5,000 PPD -ish.

Not too shabby for 1 machine.

I don't think you'll find it easy and perhaps it's not even possible, to run the GPU client in a VM. Easiest would be to run Vista as the Host and run the GPU client under Vista. RUn Gentoo as the guest in the VM and run Rosetta or better yet, FAH SMP, under Gentoo. The affinity of the VM can be assigned through task manager to avoid core 3, the default affinity of the GPU client.

A Linux SMP VM running on 3 cpu cores will produce around 2500 ppd and the GPU client will be around 5000 ppd.

Hmm... well, I'm thinking I'll just run the GPU and Rosetta clients in Vista natively, anyway. That way I avoid the VM altogether.

Any advice on cooling the GPU? I'm not worried about it but if I do OC it extensively I'd like to know what to do...

Also, when running riva tuner make sure you change the fan speed for performance 3d and that it applies setting on boot. I run the fan on my 8800GTX 100% and IMO its not loud. I have 2 med speed 120mm fans in my case that I hear over it.

EDIT: didnt see your last post. I'd try running your OC with the stock fan first and monitor the temps with GPU-Z. For folding with the GPU the only part that you need to OC is the shaders. The raising the cpu and memory appearently dont do much more than increase the heat.