A while ago I went through the scrap pile and built a Q6600 PC and threw a GTX560 I had laying around and have been crunching Seti with lunatics on it. It's been "averaging" around a 3500-4000 RAC using three cores and running two work units on the GPU. It's been very stable also. Is this a good usage of the PC, or should I have it configured differently? It's Windows 7 with 8gb of memory in it and the drivers are up to date.

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A while ago I went through the scrap pile and built a Q6600 PC and threw a GTX560 I had laying around and have been crunching Seti with lunatics on it. It's been "averaging" around a 3500-4000 RAC using three cores and running two work units on the GPU. It's been very stable also. Is this a good usage of the PC, or should I have it configured differently? It's Windows 7 with 8gb of memory in it and the drivers are up to date.

I just went looking at your computers and I don't see one with a GTX 560. I do see one with a GTX 620.

If you took the 560 out and put the 620 in, put the 560 back in.

Now, it's the 620 I'm talking about. It's was a 520 but that got placed into a PC I sold. The PC your looking at cost me a grand total of $0 built out of scrap parts. I've been doing Seti awhile and never been a "player", but since the PC is on 24/7 anyway doing and not really being used, I figured I'd fire it up. Just trying to get the most out of it.

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Im just learning how to tweak my machines, So take my opinions with a grain of salt. I see your running Open CL, Lunatics, Have boinc up to date, Running 3 cores to feed two Work units on the GPU. I dont hink you can improve on the hardware side of things.

I have a team mate who says that drivers can make a differance in run times. He has a Nvidia GTS 250 like I do and his run times are signifitly shorter than my times.I have the latest drivers he is running older ones. Something I will try down the road and see if I can dupilcate his success. You might try that route.
Or I have been reading about how some on here are adjusting a roll count. But that is beyond me at the moment.

Actually for a frankenstien build, Your getting to damn close to my I7 920 running HT and a GTS 250 GPU in RAC:) That rig is struggling to hit 6000 RAC

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Old James

I saw something odd:
First post says:

It's Windows 7 with 8gb of memory in it

but the computer's details page says:

Memory 2038.3 MB

If you do have 8 gb, what does BOINC see in the startup messages?

Not sure this matters.

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Another Fred
Support SETI@home when you search the Web with GoodSearch or shop online with GoodShop.

The x86 version of Win7 will be lucky to see 3.75GB of system memory (normally 3.2-3.5GB), but seeing only 2.04GB tells me that there is something not quite right there (the x64 version is required to address more memory).

Cheers.

A few more details. It's running the 32 bit Windows 7 and I have set up a 4gb Ram disk that houses the page file. Not ideal and should be 64 bit Windows 7, but in building it, I put in an old hard drive off the pile and everything just kind of worked. It already had Windows 7 and booted up and just never got around to upgrading it. I guess running 3 cpu tasks and 2 on the GPU is as good as it's going to get. Just thought it would do better.

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Just put a 650Ti in there, it will duplicate your RAC.

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But then I would have to BUY something. This was thrown together using parts on the scrap pile. It is what it is and I'm not trying to make a monster, but I would like to know it's getting everything out of it that it can. The only reason I threw 8gb of memory in it was I had two 4gb sticks in the pile and if I ever separate them, I'll lose one. Setting up a 4GB swap file makes it snappy if I need it to be. I'll propbly end up selling the machine, but no need to leave a built machine sit idle.

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One thing to note is the GT 620 is a Fermi GPU and might perform slightly better with Cuda 4.2 than it has been with Cuda 5.0. If you've already tried that I won't argue with the actual results, though.

                                                                   Joe

But then I would have to BUY something.

If you look at my list of computers you will see that I, too, build some out of scrap (many people would consider all of mine scrap of one sort or another).

I certainly understand the concept of not-buying things.

My 560 comment was only because you had mentioned a 560.

I have XP Pro 32, a weak Athlon II x 4, with 4GB of physical RAM supporting two GTX 660Ti cards. It's outrunning my other dual 660Ti machine with a faster 6-core Phenom II and 8GB of RAM, so I don't think system RAM is an issue with running one 620. (the Athlon's GPUs are clocked higher)

I noticed (a long time ago) that running AP tasks on CPU seemed to require more RAM and could "get in the way" but I never noticed it with MB tasks.

My machines are too different from one another for me to have any hard-and-fast rules about such things.

You might want to just experiment and drop one more CPU core leaving two free to run three GPU work units and see what that does for you. The thing that "helps" (if anything does) may not really be the newly freed core but simply reducing the traffic to and from the system RAM. Again, I've seen the difference, but I'm not going to attempt to explain why there is a difference.

The other thing is that with my less expensive cards I find there's no advantage to running three GPU work units at a time and two at a time seems to be as good as I can do. Running three only seems to gum-up the works somewhere.

Is it GPU RAM bandwidth, or PCIe bandwidth, or CPU time? Maybe. I really don't know.

I think the best thing to do is experiment if you have the time.