Hi.
I'm sure there are lots of threads about this topic, but I cant find an good answer, so I start a new one.

I just got a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Graphics card, and the speed of this thing is just insane. I don't want to overclock the card, or use unofficial modifications. I just want to configure the setup for maximum performance. There are quite a few parameters for tweaking both on the Boinc setup and the control panel of the card itself. If anyone have advice about how to setup the card for optimized number crunching, please let me know :-)

I also wonder if it would do any good to install a 2nd GTX 260 card in an multicard SLI setup. Would a setup like that require special tweaks to make it work for Boinc?

I also wonder if it would do any good to install a 2nd GTX 260 card in an multicard SLI setup. Would a setup like that require special tweaks to make it work for Boinc?

Yes. Disable SLI. (Otherwise BOINC will see the pair as one big card, and you're back to square one).

Apparently you can enable/disable SLI in the nVidia driver without rebooting the computer, so you could switch back if you wanted to use the cards for something else which was helped by SLI.

Richard, any thoughts on my issues in my post "Finally got around to installing the latest optimized clients, and.."? I sm struggling with getting the 3 extra cards seen by BOINC, they are seen in Device Manager, all 4 cards, but BOINC only sees one. Any thoughts? Thanks

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Have a look at this thread and a suggested solution at the end.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=52503

Regards
Zy

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I also wonder if it would do any good to install a 2nd GTX 260 card in an multicard SLI setup. Would a setup like that require special tweaks to make it work for Boinc?

Yes. Disable SLI. (Otherwise BOINC will see the pair as one big card, and you're back to square one).

Apparently you can enable/disable SLI in the nVidia driver without rebooting the computer, so you could switch back if you wanted to use the cards for something else which was helped by SLI.

I can confirm this. A friend of mine has two 7900GT's in SLI (even in the 17x.xx driver version) and could enable and disable SLI on-the-fly without a reboot. So you can play games for a little while, and then go back to wicked crunching, but it can't be done automatically..it does require intervention.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Just a quick comment. I have 2x nVidia XFX GTX280 1Gb PCI Express Graphics Cards, and when I change from SLI to seperate use with the NVidia Control Panel I have to reboot in order for Boinc to notice the change. Not that I bother often as I don't play games very often and if I do one card is enough anyway.

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Resistence is futile! {evil cackle}

I use a CUDA card on a quad core computer, it seems like the Quad core is mostly idle while the CUDA does the computing. How can I optimize this?

Go into the Seti@home preferences after you have signed into your account and set it like this...

Run only the selected applications SETI@home Enhanced: yes
Astropulse: no
Astropulse v5: no
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? yes
Use Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) if available yes
Use Central Processing Unit (CPU) yes

This way you will probably get a lot of cuda work units and also a couple of astropulse work units as well for the cpu to run on.
I also set mine to have enough work for four days or the astropulse stuff doesn't clear in time to be able to keep enough work units for the cuda capable gpu's.

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Resistence is futile! {evil cackle}

Go into the Seti@home preferences after you have signed into your account and set it like this...

Run only the selected applications SETI@home Enhanced: yes
Astropulse: no
Astropulse v5: no
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? yes
Use Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) if available yes
Use Central Processing Unit (CPU) yes

This way you will probably get a lot of cuda work units and also a couple of astropulse work units as well for the cpu to run on.
I also set mine to have enough work for four days or the astropulse stuff doesn't clear in time to be able to keep enough work units for the cuda capable gpu's.

Thanx. This setup works perfectly. 4 Astropulses and a very bussy cuda card running fulltime.

My experience running two GTX 260 has been that you can switch back and forth between SLI mode without a reboot, however, it does require stopping BOINC and going into display properties and extending the desktop to your secondary display, then restarting BOINC. This may be dependent upon which driver or BOINC version you're running. I also run a dummy plug on my second card in lieu of a second monitor.

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