I have recently started using Granola in an attempt to lower my electric bill.
http://grano.la/
I have a couple windows gadgets installed that monitor my hardware.
Once installed and running Granola will start cutting back the amount of power my pc uses.
It has 3 modes: high power, miserware, and slowest speed.
I am concerned at what effect Granola will have on crunching.
When I have boinc set to run my cpu at 100%, my windows cpu gadget reflects that.
When I set Granola on its miserware mode, the cpu gadget says the cores are at 50%.
Also on miserware mode my electric power used is reduced by 100 watts.
My pc typically pulls 330 watts with one cpu and one gpu.
Has anyone here tried out Granola and experimented with it much with boinc?

Computers utilize considerable amounts of energy and there is little that has been done to make them more eco-friendly.
There is a solution of sorts and it’s called Granola!

This is an intelligent software power management solution for computers that use Microsoft Windows and Linux. This software can apparently reduce the total system energy use by 10-35% even when the system is being fully utilized.
But fear not! It does not compromise performance!

And what’s more is that it’s a freeware program and it’s guaranteed to optimize the power usage of your computer without slowing down the machine.

It's obvious - if "the cores are at 50%" then the computer will have half the previous "production" for SETI

"It does not compromise performance!" and "without slowing down the machine"
probably means that if some process with >= "Normal Priority" wants the CPU it gets it.
But it seems the "Low Priority" SETI process is throttled.

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

I'm not sure what your question is as far as how it will affect Boinc.

It stands to reason that if the power saving software cuts the CPU to 50%, Boinc work on those cores is going to be reduced by 50% as well.
Don't know if the software plays with the GPU speed or not.

There is no free lunch....
If you are saving 100 watts of power consumption some Boinc work is not going to get done. It depends on what your priorities are.

The only other factor is whether it plays nice with Boinc as far as not creating errors or downclocking the GPU and not bringing it back up to speed.

You would have to monitor your rig and results to determine that.

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

To answer the subject: No :)

It works OK with CPU it seems, but doesn't throttle GPU. I'll keep TThrottle :)

Actually I was incorrect on that, it does not effect the cpu performance from what I can tell.
I have it set on the lowest speed mode which cuts the power back by 100 watts.
It drops the power down from 330 watts to 230 according to my Kill A Watt meter.
But was curious if it will reduce my crunching output?

Actually I was incorrect on that, it does not effect the cpu performance.
I have it set on the lowest speed mode which cuts the power back by 100 watts.
It drops the power down from 330 watts to 230 according to my Kill A Watt meter.
But was curious if it will reduce my crunching output?

Simple answer....yes.
Unless it can find a way to reduce power consumption without changing the speed or percentage of use on the CPU, your output will go down.

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

Actually I was incorrect on that, it does not effect the cpu performance from what I can tell.
I have it set on the lowest speed mode which cuts the power back by 100 watts.
It drops the power down from 330 watts to 230 according to my Kill A Watt meter.
But was curious if it will reduce my crunching output?

I had TThrottle running without being active, and the CPU temp went clearly down when I choose lowest speed in Granoly = less work being done.

Ok yes you all are right. Just tried playing a computer game and it was sluggish while in the slow speed mode.

Ok yes you all are right. Just tried playing a computer game and it was sluggish while in the slow speed mode.

Like I said, there is no free lunch.
You can have your power savings, or you can have full performance.
You just cannot have both.

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

About the the only option I can think of is Game Booster. It's not gonna lower the power usage much (if any), but at least one is using more wattage toward actually producing results.

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You always have to watch out for the point of diminishing returns. If you reduce your power usage by 33% and your output is only reduced 25%. Then I would say it is a fair compromise. If you reduce your power usage by 33% and reduce your output by 50% I'm not sure that is a fair trade off.

As BOINC has built in functions to limit the hardware used I would probably just it to use 50% of processors or use the build in OS power saving functions. On my i7 machine while running BOINC 100% the stock cooler couldn't handle it with the warmer spring/summer temps. So in Windows 7 I setup a power plan that had Max Processor State to, I think it was, 80%. Which lowered the max clock that the CPU would run at. Generating less heat so the system wouldn't lock up & using less power.
I made batch files and utilized the powercfg command line parameters to switch between my custom plan and the normal 100% one.

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