New Folder here

Hello everyone. Been a bencher here for a while now, thought I could help out a little with my new rig. I know absolutely nothing about folding, that being said, I need some help.

I'd like this machine to fold when I leave work for the day until the next morning and all weekend long. I'm using it during the day, so I can't during the day. Here is my first question. Is there a way to set up a schedule for it, or is it just up to me to start it up when I leave?

Second question, I'm running this i7-3930k at 4.5ghz and I also have 2- 7970's. Are those being used as well? Can they?

Third question, do I need to do anything other that starting up the client? Tweaks for multiple video cards? Settings for 6 core 12 threads?

Thanks for your help with these questions. I will see what else I can get running here soon.

7970's can be used, but they are terribly inefficient compared to Nvidia cards. ANY folding helps, but they are not big on points.

Not sure about a schedule, but you can 'pause' the work with the latest client that is out.

Outside of that, the experts will be in shortly to help Im sure.

Thanks. I'm going to try to get some other machines running, but all my cards are AMD. We'll see if it's worth the extra heat then with the 7970's.

Heya GoD_tattoo, nice to have you join in with us

Nice CPU you got there. I hope to get my 6 core Xeon up to those speeds when I have a day or so to play
Is a pretty similar chip really, but I am tied to using my BCLK but I have that stable at 220 so am hopeful for at least 4GHz and maybe 4.4GHz with some luck ^^

Anyways, onto your folding...

I set mine to fold using 10 cores leaving 2 spare. Testing one WU (Work Unit) a while back there was really no difference between 10 and 12 cores for me.
This can be due to the Hyperthreaded cores relying on the Physical cores for their share of the floating point work.

Radeon GFx cards need 1 CPU core spare to feed them folding info for each card. So you would need to make your SMP CPU's set to 10 anyways.
It is important to reduce the SMP CPU cores when using these cards as folding@home can take a huge PPD performance hit when it finds it has 12 CPU cores worth of work assigned and only 10 cores available.

Now about those rather nice 7970 cards you have there...
...unfortunately the folding@home software has not yet been updated to take advantage of the new 7000 series updated GCN architecture and so produce only about the same PPD as a 6870 will - about 8,400 per card
I find running Older games like the original Deus Ex has no performance impact with doing GFx folding, but more modern games do, but perhaps will not be an issue on your setup - especially can folding@home does not utilise your cards to their potential yet

I find no need to stop folding on my CPU while doing anything - have not noticed any impact on any application yet - my setup with SMP 10 (you must set even numbers of SMP CPU cores as some WU have problems with prime numbers over 3 and will fail) and one GFx card uses 93% CPU time

By default folding@home uses max CPU cores, if you want change this so you can use your GFx cards:

In FAHControl change Novice to Expert in the "dropdown"
Click the Configure Button
Click the Slots Tab
Select "1 SMP"
Click the Edit button
Change CPUs from -1 (auto - uses max cores) to 10
Then Click OK, then Save

For the changes to take effect when folding has already started, just Pause + wait for folding to stop, and Start Folding again and all should be running as hoped.
(there is a CPU usage slider in there somewhere but it only affects one CPU core... so I ignore it)

Your 1st 10 completed SMP WU's will give only the lower base credit with no bonus - after this and maintaining 80% successful WU completion you will start being rewards bonus points that can quadruple your PPD scores

You can always have a play and see which way you want to play this and what works best for you. with 7970's running or not.
My CPU @ 3.6GHz makes 25k PPD with SMP 10, but then so does a 3770k @ 4.5GHz roughly. I expect your should make some nice numbers there, hope you enjoy finding out what works best for you

Got it set up and running the way you recommended. I didn't think I'd be able to do anything with this things at 100% like this. Why is that? I am running streaming audio, multiple connections to VM's, several other work programs, and XBMC. And this thing isn't even slowing down.

Thanks for the help, both GPU's are pegged also. I'm getting that the PPD is what we are looking at? What are most people pulling in?

Appreciate the help.

welcome View attachment new folder.bmp shal the PPD chase be ever ensuing

Where is the best place to see what my PPD is?

to the Team GoD_tattoo

HFM.NET - Client Monitoring Application for the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project

HFM.NET

Good going

folding@home has a Low priority, kinda takes up the slack in your system. Any other apps with a higher priority (usually apps are set to Normal) take CPU time away from the folding process almost instantly - you should not be able to notice any lag it happens so fast.

I am going to guess you will be making a total of 46k PPD probably with this setup

30k from SMP 10 CPU processing - perhaps more ?
8k PPD from each 7970 I would guess, will be interesting to see

Once you have completed your 1st WU check out Extreme Overclocking's folding pages and search for your username there - has all the info you could hope for, have a dig around...
They update their stats ever 3 hours - see the counter for "Next Run" in the top left
Sometimes if you finish a WU close to that time it will cross over to the next set in another 3 hours time.

Best pages there would be:

Our team www.overclockers.com page
Your User Page (mine for examples sake)
and maybe your Team Rank position (I am currently 297 so page 3 and about to get passed by Operant ^^)

Looking forward to see what you pull with this setup too ^^

Humanoid1 said:

I am going to guess you will be making a total of 46k PPD probably with this setup

Click to expand...

Should get close to that on cpu alone........(Depending on setup)

Gpu's can't say Haven't folded on one in awhile.

am sure you could be right, just making a Conservative guess he will hopefully surpass pretty easy at that speed, but will see ^^

BTW GoD_tattoo, you did get & use a Passkey when you setup your goods ?? yes....

'Cuda340 said:

BTW GoD_tattoo, you did get & use a Passkey when you setup your goods ?? yes....

Click to expand...

Yes. I followed the instructions in the sticky, then went to Stanford and got a passkey

I will have to let you guys know what I pull on a different day. My O/C was fine for 24/7, passed IBT, but not for folding I guess. Going to bump up some voltage and see how it goes, but I will wait until I'm here all day to watch it. Don't want this thing sitting hung up or on a BSOD all night.

For sure, Good Luck with that when you get there

GoD_tattoo said:

My O/C was fine for 24/7, passed IBT, but not for folding I guess.

Click to expand...

We get that alot here

Don't give up on it though.........We need all the cycles we can get.

No I have it running right now. Couple voltage changes, and set up some fan profiles for the gpu's, and it is purring right along. So far so good. Hopefully I'll have some time to set up some Core 2 Duo machines tomorrow and maybe a virtual machine...But who knows what tomorrow will bring here at work...

What MB are you using? I would guess X79 from that CPU you have.

Humanoid1 said:

and maybe your Team Rank position (I am currently 297 so page 3 and about to get passed by Operant ^^)

Click to expand...

Well, in 2.1 days... Should hit over a million points for this month tomorrow!

Back on topic, that is a solid setup you have got there GoD. Can't wait to see the PPD.

WhitehawkEQ said:

What MB are you using? I would guess X79 from that CPU you have.

Click to expand...

AsRock X79 Extreme 7 for the mb, 24gb of Ripjaws 1600, crucial M4 256, and 3-4tb WD Blacks for storage. It is by far the most insane rig I've built yet. I can't slow it down at all. It's the one in my sig. I'll post up some pics soon.

I also forgot (believe it or not) I have 3 brand new 2600K machines sitting around not even booted up yet. I'll get those going today as well. That should kick it up a notch. They all have dual 6950's in them, so once overclocked they should help out alot. I laughed yesterday when I realized I had actually forgotten about 3-2600k machines. That's pretty bad.

And in case anyone is wondering, no its not my money. I'm broke. But I have an amazing job with a ton of money, and I get complete freedom when buying parts and building new machines. So I go all out. And I have freedom to test machines however I wish, so folding on them for an extended period is a good test. Hopefully I can run these 2600's for close to a year.

Sounds pretty damn fine to me

At least that is one area you won't have to spend you hard? earnt cash on xD