One machine.

I went from 3000 points a month with my old P4 Northwood to 3+ times that PER DAY with the new i7, about a hundred-fold increase.

Yeah baby!

18,713 points posted yesterday. That more than I did in the last 6 months with my old computer. In hindsight it wasn't worth the electricity I was using.

Nice one 'Ol Timer'.....




Regards & 'Keep it Up'...

Pete

setup? clients?

I will reveal all. Soon. I want to enjoy my top 3 production status for a couple of days before I reveal all of my "secrets."

The clues are all about you in my recent posts.

I was out of town this weekend and my system rebooted last night, shortly after midnight, and I don't have my FAH clients set up to run automatically so I've posted 0 points today. I'll post a few points before midnight but my daily average is going to take a major beating.

0 points posted Sunday. Ouch.

It looks like my production is going to run from about 13K to 15K PPD with an average of around 14K. I won't surpass dasman but I may give Aristide1 some competition in daily production.

Hardware:

• Intel Core i7 920 running at 3.2 GHz at stock voltage. It ran stable at 3.3 GHz but my cpu temps and fan speed were both a bit higher than I wanted so I backed off a scoche to 3.2. Zero stability problems.
• 6GB memory running at DDR-1280 at 8-8-8-20 timings. It's DDR-1600 memory but I haven't made any effort to run it at that speed.
• Two NVIDIA GTS-250 graphics cards. These are essentially rebadged 9800 GTX+. I have played around a bit with overclocking them but with no real definitive improvement noted. I'm back to stock clocks on them: 1836/756/1100 shader/core/memory. I am running the beleaguered and frowned-upon 185.20 drivers.

FAH Clients

• 2x GPU systray. FahMon is showing 9400 PPD at the moment on a pair of 5903s.
• 4x instances of the 'Notfred' folding appliance running under VMware Player. FahMon does a lousy job of monitoring these clients but when it has deigned to report PPD, or when I've calculated PPD manually, I'm seeing around 6500 PPD from the 4. There's usually three of them running around 1700 and a fourth lagging a bit.

Miscellaneous

• OS: Windows 7 Build 7000 (i.e. the public beta build)
• Power draw according to a Kill A Watt is averaging around 350W at the moment with all clients running.
• My CPU utilization tends to hover in the 93% range.

Temps

• CPU: 62C. It varies (obviously) with load and ambient temperature. The CPU fan is running at 1241 RPM according to Everest. This has been pretty typical.
• GPU: 60C is typical but I've seen one of them run as high as 70C on some WUs with the 185.20 drivers. The fans are on auto and tend to run at 45% to 55%. I don't hear them except when I reboot and they briefly run at 100%

As an aside, I'm building a second PC out of "surplus" parts from my first build:

• AMD Phenom II 720 processor. This is a nice processor that overclocks to 3.6 GH without a sweat. It's no i7, but for what it is, a $130 CPU, it's outstanding.
• Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P motherboard. This is a really nice mobo. I highly recommend it.
  I waited TWO MONTHS for the Asus P6T Deluxe V2 and literally TWO DAYS after taking delivery of the above, the V2 board became available at Newegg.
• Scythe Mugen 2 CPU cooler. I bought two coolers, this one and a Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. I'm using the TRUE on the i7 with the Scythe fan. Temps are actually slightly higher but I prefer it for some 'practical' reasons.
• Enermax Modu82+ 625W PSU. I didn't need it, but I have a spanking new Zalman 770W ZM770-XT sitting on the floor beside me. It's 80 Plus Bronze rated like the Enermax. Hopefully the higher power rating and 140mm fan will allow it to spin a bit slower than the Enermax, which runs 1200 to 1300 RPM. I don't hear it but it just makes me think it's "working hard."
• Asus EN9600GT Silent graphics card. I bought this before I knew about GPU folding.
• 750GB WD HDD. This isn't really surplus but with the 640GB internal and a 1TB drive, I can live without it for now. When I need more space I'll buy one of the 1.5TB drives from Samsung or WD or maybe even the WD 2TB drive if the price comes down a bit.
• Vista Home Premium. I'm running the Windows7 beta and like it so much I'm keeping it. Until August 1 when it expires anyway. I'll figure out something until Win7 ships.

Bought to complete the rig:

• Antec P182 ($129 with free shipping). An Antec Three Hundred would have worked too, for $59 plus shipping.
• G.Skill 2x2GB memory. On the officially approved list for the Gigabyte mobo.
• LG optical drive

I haven't figured out what I'm going to DO with the second machine. It'll fold while I figure that out. It's purpose is simply to assuage my guilt over all the stuff I bought and subsequently replaced. GOOD stuff, just ultimately second choices.

nice sounding setup.
what is this 'Notfred' appliance you speak of?

I have a single gtx 280 running and it does quite nice but the SMP client under windows is lacking.

Folding Virtual Appliance

User-friendly Instructions for Installing the Folding Virtual Appliance


That's the reason for this crazy situation where running multiple instances of the Linux SMP client in virtual machines under Windows generates more PPD than running the native Windows SMP client.

The day the A2 core becomes available for Windows, I'll happily get rid of the four VM sessions and run ONE instance of the SMP client. The VMs under VMware Player are limited to using only 2 cores. The i7 has 8 (with HyperThreading enabled) so 4 instances of the Appliance are required to fully utilize the CPU. Literally, my CPU utilization with 1, 2, 3, and 4 instances of the appliance are 23%, 46%, 69%, 92%.

Odd. My 1x smp reads 100% in Vx64.

Of course we've been having SERIOUS issues with our ISP, so no one's seing the points

Nice setup Hays, but you're really killing me here:

My 2 local pcs? About 480 watts.

My X2 Black Edition is going to be idle soon, as running SMP it sucks up as much as a 9600GSO with a much smaller contribution. Very annoying. It will be on, but no more SMP.

I would love to see you power consumption with the 720, as XbitLabs report is biased (about 30 watts too high) because on that batch of tests they used an ATI 4870 video card, the black hole of electricity.

The latest X3s have nice combos on NewEgg. I do hope they scale well because the X2's I have when I OC the consumption rises faster than the speed. So mine stay near stock speeds now. I even thought about a 4850e. That's the only one that uses lower voltage. The 45nm X3s and X4s all still require the same voltage as before.

Windows has never used 4 cores efficiently with programs like SMP, that's why people run 2 SMPs on a quad core and pick up an addition 1000-1800 PPD. It's ridiculous.

The alternative to this doubling up is to run Ubuntu 64 bit.

I'm curious how well the 4 threads work on a 3 core with Windows. It should be more efficient.

I actually drop points running another client in Vx64

1xSMP, 1x GPU2 is most efficient on my machine.

The i7 has 4 physical cores, 8 virtual cores. I wasn't that surprised at the just over 50% CPU usage of the Windows SMP client. I have been shocked at how completely the four Linux SMP clients in the VMs are able to utilize the CPU. I'm seeing a steady 97%, with frequent peaks of 98% with my machine doing nothing else.

But most gratifying of all is that I'm doing 15K a day (if I wouldn't keep breaking my computer and losing hours and hours of folding time) and I can BARELY hear the machine running. The CPU fan is running at only 1029 RPM despite the CPU being overclocked to 3.2GHz. The GPU fans are running at just 37% to 41% on auto. The loudest thing in the system may be the rear chassis fan at 1133 RPM. It IS possible to build a powerful and yet quiet computer.

That's good news that Windows is working properly.

Thanks for the info!

I have 4 cores available on my desktop and with my recent RAM upgrade (6GB FTW!!) - I can look into re-enabling vmware and trying this thing out.

that and my GTX280 should generate some very nice PPD figures.

280s are the business

A few days ago I came home at lunch to the sound of a high pitched squeal. My computer was off. The sound was coming from my APC UPS. The electricity was off but came back on shortly. I rebooted my computer, expecting it to come out of hibernation. Instead it booted up normally.

I checked PowerChute, the APC software. No events recorded. What?! No events?! The electricity just went out. That's not an "event"?

I called APC support. To make a long story short, my new rig was too much for the UPS. It was able to handle my rig in "pass through" mode, but as soon as the power went out and my rig went on the battery, BANG, the circuit breaker on the UPS tripped.

I never thought about the new computer overloading the UPS. I figured it wouldn't give me a whole lot of time, but enough time to hibernate and shut things down in an orderly fashion. Now I know better. When they rate a UPS for 395 watts, they aren't kidding. You try to suck more out of it than that and bang, it overloads and shuts off.

I rearranged things and put just the system unit on the UPS, the monitor just on the surge suppressor side, and everything else into a surge/power strip plugged directly into the wall. I haven't tried yanking the plug out of the wall to see if the battery will support the load and I don't intend to. This was just a short-term kludge to get my system back up.

I immediately did some research on higher powered UPSs and ordered a CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD (1500VA 900W). It was basically a coin flip between that and an APC BR1500LCD. That arrived today but I haven't shut down yet to hook it up. It's a nice looking unit, with a big blue LCD display showing status information.

Oh same story at work. They upgraded desk PCs but not the UPSs. They plugged the monitor on the direct line. The power went out and the PC stayed up. I moved the monitor to battery backup and the whole thing stopped dead. Now I know better.

Damn thats a big UPS.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

It's actually a fairly compact unit. And dead quiet.