Yeah, I would think Furmark would test out the GPU's but it doesn't put a lot of stress on the CPU's. It is tough to find something that stresses the whole computer the whole time in a multi threaded environment.

That where linx comes in, run it with furmark running and you are testing cpu / gpu / then put on a mix prime95 running a blend test. If it doesn't crash it would be one heck of a test for sure.

Normally I just run OCCT and put it on a full system test for 24 hours after I OC to make sure it's stable. Steve it would be hard to imagine what kind of power that pc has without seeing it in person. I can let Seti crunch in the spare cycles on my machine while playing a full screen game and have live tv going. The live tv hiccups ever so often but the machine does it!

When it's not crashing, I haven't found the limits. I crashed a couple of times, and was forced to drop my speed to 4.2 GHz. Tomorrow, I will reduce the multiplier, and raise the BCLK speed so that I get a good fast memory OC, while sticking near this 4.2 GHz CPU clock. Man, I am never awake at this time. I am very, very pleased with this system.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

I am very, very pleased with this system.

Steve

As you should be. That type of system would make a lot of people jealous. The only reason I could see to build a machine like that is for Seti lol. My machine makes me immeasurably happy except when I compare crunching numbers with people like you lol. I would consider, in reality, my machine to be more than enough for most people. You're machine? Well that's like buying a 747 when you need a kite.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Uuh....PCIE Clock of 120 with a BLCK of only 170? The only Guys that i know that uses that high of
PCIE Clock are the LN2 Guys. :D World Record Hunter.

I always run my Boards at a BLCK of 200 and higher but i never needed such a
high PCIE Clock to get it stable. On my Asus R2E a PCIE Clock of 105 is enough
for a BLCK of 200. With my actually Asus R3E running with a BLCK Clock of 225
a PCIE Clock of 105 is also enough.

Try to lower the PCIE clock to 103 or 105. That should be enough and stabilized
the Board.

You may also read a little Bit on XS Forums - like this Thread:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=210275

Helli

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A loooong time ago: First Credits after SETI@home Restart

Another thing you may have an eye on it is to check the GPU Clock on both your GTX480.
I have seen that some Workunits done by your GPUs takes 1300 Second and some takes 1600
Seconds - with the same AR of 0.42x. It looks like the Nvidia driver shuts your second GTX
down into Power Save Mode. I had the same Problem here (after a few hours the second GTX
here was downclocked from 825 MHZ to 405 MHz) and have to downgrade to Driver Version 257.21
to prevent the downclocking of my second GTX465.

You can use GPU-Z or Afterburner to check the GPU Clock from Time to Time...

Helli

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A loooong time ago: First Credits after SETI@home Restart

Based on the excellent feedback, I have changed things to see how they work. My BCLK speed is 199, with my RAM at 1994 MHz. My CPU speed is only 4.19 GHz for the moment just to see if things stay stable, My PCIe bus is 105 MHz. So far, so good, although my floating point and integer calculations are lower than they were, but my RAM is much faster. I am pulling 900 watts for the tower. I did flash the lates BIOS before changing everything, but I forgot and cleared all the checksums. No problem, I got back close to where I was before. Selecting the correct hard drive, ignoring the missing CPU fan, and some voltages. Thank you Helli, Brkovip, BeNt, and Wiggo for your excellent information. Now I'll see if I can get to 4.5 GHz and stay stable.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Oh no what have we created!!!

Hehe, good going Steve. Ultimately what are you shooting for, just the highest you can run stable or the highest point period? I'm sure that i7 with the cooling you've got you should be able to hit the 4.3-4.5 mark very stably. But then again 12Gb of ram and 2 video cards kind of throws a kicker in there. At quite frankly anywhere 4Ghz+ is very admirable, especially staying stable loaded with work! So good luck and keep us updated.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

If you wanna open up a whole new can of worms....LOL.

Turn HT off.

You should see completion times for the CPU work drop almost in half.
Power consumption should go down a bit.
And may allow a higher stable OC.

---

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Another thing you may have an eye on it is to check the GPU Clock on both your GTX480.
I have seen that some Workunits done by your GPUs takes 1300 Second and some takes 1600
Seconds - with the same AR of 0.42x. It looks like the Nvidia driver shuts your second GTX
down into Power Save Mode. I had the same Problem here (after a few hours the second GTX
here was downclocked from 825 MHZ to 405 MHz) and have to downgrade to Driver Version 257.21
to prevent the downclocking of my second GTX465.

You can use GPU-Z or Afterburner to check the GPU Clock from Time to Time...

Helli

You are right! I hadn't noticed that. I am hoping the next driver will fix that, because going backwards might not be the right thing to allow me to test new CUDA apps at Lunatics. I will have to work on that. The second card down clocked from 860 MHz to 405 MHz. I will try various things before going backwards with the driver. Thank you for the heads up!

If you wanna open up a whole new can of worms....LOL.

Turn HT off.

You should see completion times for the CPU work drop almost in half.
Power consumption should go down a bit.
And may allow a higher stable OC.

Hello Mark! I used to run that way until Einstein. I had topped out nowhere near the top 20, and one of the developers suggested I turn hyperthreading on. I did, and added 1h, 20m to my crunch times, but the additional throughput shot me to the #3 position in top computers. I want to try the same configuration here to see what it does. Since I am running 3 wu's per GPU, I am running 18 at a time total. Now that I seem to have my crashing problem under control, with my RAM now at 1994 MHz, that should be interesting to see once I figure out how to have that other card keep it's clocks at 860 MHz.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Whatever works the best for you....every rig is a bit different.

As to the GPUs...
I am running several different drivers on various rigs, and the only time I have a card downclock is if I push the OC too high.
They automatically downclock if they are not processing Cuda work, but ramp right back up as soon as there is work to do.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Whatever works the best for you....every rig is a bit different.

As to the GPUs...
I am running several different drivers on various rigs, and the only time I have a card downclock is if I push the OC too high.
They automatically downclock if they are not processing Cuda work, but ramp right back up as soon as there is work to do.

I'll back off the OC on that second card to see if that makes a difference. If hyperthreading seems to slow me down, I will have no problem turning it off. Thank for the information! You were the first one to offer assistance to me when I first stumbled on these boards a year ago. I haven't forgotten! :D

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

I down clocked my GPU's to 850 MHz, and 1950 MHz memory. So far it is holding just fine on both cards. I rechecked both cards before doing an adjustment, and they were both at 405 MHz. Maybe I didn't have enough voltage. Once I see them stable, I'll crank them up again with maximum voltage and see what happens.

Steve

Edit; My tower is now pulling 930 watts. Wow!

---

Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Well turning HT off may cut your times in half but then you are only a third less the work for the amount of time correct? If this was a P4 W/HT I could see it but I would imagine the HT on the i7's is quite a bit better? But like you said each machine is different so it may depend on your setup. I've never been a huge fan of HT in the past it always seemed to cause more issues than it solved.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Well turning HT off may cut your times in half but then you are only a third less the work for the amount of time correct? If this was a P4 W/HT I could see it but I would imagine the HT on the i7's is quite a bit better? But like you said each machine is different so it may depend on your setup. I've never been a huge fan of HT in the past it always seemed to cause more issues than it solved.

Right now it is an experiment. I really don't know if it will work correctly or not. It certainly did wonders when I was crunching Einstein. I had completely topped out, and when I turned hyperthreading on, it started shooting up very quickly.

Steve

---

Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

I down clocked my GPU's to 850 MHz, and 1950 MHz memory. So far it is holding just fine on both cards. I rechecked both cards before doing an adjustment, and they were both at 405 MHz. Maybe I didn't have enough voltage. Once I see them stable, I'll crank them up again with maximum voltage and see what happens.

Steve

Edit; My tower is now pulling 930 watts. Wow!

Mine hit 950 with my setup and the over clocks when they were getting warm. Makes me happy to have an 1100 watt PS.

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Well turning HT off may cut your times in half but then you are only a third less the work for the amount of time correct? If this was a P4 W/HT I could see it but I would imagine the HT on the i7's is quite a bit better? But like you said each machine is different so it may depend on your setup. I've never been a huge fan of HT in the past it always seemed to cause more issues than it solved.

Right now it is an experiment. I really don't know if it will work correctly or not. It certainly did wonders when I was crunching Einstein. I had completely topped out, and when I turned hyperthreading on, it started shooting up very quickly.

Steve

HT on the P4's are a joke. The i7's seem to do pretty good, I didn't notice a decrease in times when I turned HT on.

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I have learned a lot. Before the Great Outage, I had hyperthreading turned off, and my GPU's were driving my system. When I went to Einstein full time, A developer suggested I turn hyperthreading back on. When I did, the results were tremendous. I wqs able to keep a high clock speed with all 12 threads crunching, and the gPU's crunching in their limited fashion for Einstein work. When SETI came back, I decided to try hyperthreading and see if it gave me similar results to Einstein. That was followed by numerous crashes, which finally I thought I was able to get under control. As Helli pointed out earlier in this thread, one of my GPU's was de-clocking itself. I finally fixed it by increasing the voltage to maximum, then the crashes started again.

I slowed down the GPU's several times, slowed the CPU down all the way to 3.8 GHz, and still it crashed. No combination would give me trouble free operation. I even tried only crunching on 11 threads instead of 12. It kept crashing. Last night it crashed again shortly after I had gone to bed. I knew because of the tell tail beep, that signaled a reboot was in process. I got up, and turned off hyperthreading, and restarted the system. This morning there had been no crashes, and the system was operating like it used to. I set the GPU's back to 860 MHz, with 1975 MHz on the memory. No problems at all, although with that high GPU voltage, my GPU's are not at 55°C, which is higher than they have ever been. When I get home tonight, I will kick my CPU RAM back up to 1994 MHz, and my CPU to 4.38 GHz and see what happens.

The bottom line is that I can not just have one configuration that works for Einstein and SETI. They both have to be tuned to the applications to maximize performance. I think this is a characteristic of my particular CPU. Under very heavy GPU load, the system is prone to crashing with hyperthreading turned on, regardless of clock speeds. With hyperthreading turned off, the system is much more stable, and can be driven much harder without crashing while under very heavy GPU use. Well now I know. My RAC jumped about 150 points in the hour it took me to get to work. I can't wait to kick the CPU and RAM up this evening. I think I am 4.16 GHz for the CPU, and 16?? on the RAM.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Even without the overclocking, there seems to be some tuning I can do.

I tried turning my processers all up to 100%. It not only degraded my non-boinc performance, but also greatly increased my GPU times. Taking it back to 90% helped.. But some fine tuning is needed to find the happiest spot. Too low % decreases CPU output, too high decreases GPU output.

Running on an I5, I am limited in what I can do, there is no hyperthreading on this particular chip(4x4). So it is time to start writing some things down and playing with them.

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Janice

Even without the overclocking, there seems to be some tuning I can do.

I tried turning my processers all up to 100%. It not only degraded my non-boinc performance, but also greatly increased my GPU times. Taking it back to 90% helped.. But some fine tuning is needed to find the happiest spot. Too low % decreases CPU output, too high decreases GPU output.

Running on an I5, I am limited in what I can do, there is no hyperthreading on this particular chip(4x4). So it is time to start writing some things down and playing with them.

That is a good point. I need to start keeping a journel of the changes I make for any particular usage. The older I get, the more I tend to forget things. Perhaps in a few years I will forget that I forget things.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Holly Molly! With everything working as it should on my rig, my RAC is increasing almost 200 points an hour. I can't wait to get home and really speed it up.

Steve

---

Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

LOL Steve....

What'd I say about turning HT off?
Seems it may work the trick for you.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster