GPU life expectancy

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JLConawayII

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Message 1057786 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 13:32:38 UTC

In my experience, laptops are notorious for burning up under extended heavy use. The components are compressed into a very confined area, which leads to easy overheating at the stress levels your hardware will experience running BOINC projects.
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Profile John Clark
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Message 1057800 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 14:26:09 UTC - in response to Message 1057786.  

In my experience, laptops are notorious for burning up under extended heavy use. The components are compressed into a very confined area, which leads to easy overheating at the stress levels your hardware will experience running BOINC projects.



My7 experience is the opposite.

I used a laptop to crunch S@H for 6 years on a never stopped basis. Nothing went wrong with that rig, but it was very slow. No GPU crunching in those days.
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Message 1057809 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 14:44:11 UTC - in response to Message 1057738.  

I'm wondering if I should overclock my 295 GPUs. The card runs fine if not overclocked but if I overclock the temps don't go too high but it generates some errors like watching blu-ray it'll sometimes stop playing with an error about copy protection (even when boinc is suspended). When I reboot and no overclocking the movies play fine (although I have to suspend boinc to watch blu-rays smoothly).

So I'm just wondering if I should overclock for the performance gain or will my workunits be "worthless" if they have errors? I've noticed an increase in credits but I'm not sure if all errors are detected and those workunits uncredited..

I guess it depends on if you want to crunch or watch blu-rays.
You have already answered your question in regards to watching movies. The OC obviously does not work well.

As far as crunching, like OCing anything else, you would have to try it and monitor the results.
If overclocked too far, my GPUs will do one of several things....
Crash outright, requiring a reboot of the rig.
Downclock themselves, requiring a reboot.
Or, start generating errors on the WUs they are processing.

Just yesterday, my new GTX470 went bonkers and proceeded to error out my entire GPU cache of about 500 WUs. Not a good time for that to happen, given the limited availability of work at present. Backing the shader clock off seems to have put it right again, and it is back at work.

If you wanna give it a go, you will have to monitor things.
Try your overclock settings. See if the card stays at the higher settings without downclocking itself. Watch the temps.
If that all looks OK, keep an eye on the Seti work that it returns.
From your main account page, click computers on this account. Click on tasks for the computer in question. This will show you all work that is assigned to the computer. Then you can click on error or valid or pending to see the completed work. An error here and there is nothing to worry about, some are the fault of the WU. But if you see a lot of errors being reported, something is amiss, and you should try slowing the card back down a little.

Good luck with it.
"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

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Message 1057914 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 20:28:49 UTC - in response to Message 1057738.  

I'm wondering if I should overclock my 295 GPUs. The card runs fine if not overclocked but if I overclock the temps don't go too high but it generates some errors like watching blu-ray it'll sometimes stop playing with an error about copy protection (even when boinc is suspended). When I reboot and no overclocking the movies play fine (although I have to suspend boinc to watch blu-rays smoothly).

So I'm just wondering if I should overclock for the performance gain or will my workunits be "worthless" if they have errors? I've noticed an increase in credits but I'm not sure if all errors are detected and those workunits uncredited..


Another thing to note. If over-clocked and through copy protection errors, that means it is failing checksum validation. This also means your over-clock isn't stable and eventually will crash your computer or start turning in bad results. I would suggest you mess with your settings a bit more on your O/C. A fully stable O/C will have no ill side effects on any operation on your system.

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Message 1057919 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 20:33:55 UTC

i just ordered a Sony Z series laptop today with Core i7 620m and GT330m gpu to replace my P8700 Dell Vostro 1320. the fact that the 9300m gs in the Vostro won't crunch is a real niggler....

Should I run the Core i7 in hyperthread or to crunch 4 units at a time instead of 2 or? Anyone know what the performance increase is? I read somewhere that if you don't select to enable hyperthreading at set up you can't switch it on afterwards without a fresh install. True or false?

Also why does my Atom 270 have 30+ workunits stacked up in reserve whereas the Vostro downloads only what it is working on. The settings are the same on my one account?

David
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Message 1057920 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 20:35:33 UTC

HT is controlled by a setting in the bios, you can turn it on and off at will. Just like you can swap processors (if it's the same motherboard) and not have to reinstall Windows.
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Henri Ala-Peijari

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Message 1057937 - Posted: 19 Dec 2010, 22:04:19 UTC - in response to Message 1057919.  


Also why does my Atom 270 have 30+ workunits stacked up in reserve whereas the Vostro downloads only what it is working on. The settings are the same on my one account?

David


Cache is determined individually for each client software from something like "advanced - preferences - network usage - additional work buffer".

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Message boards : Number crunching : GPU life expectancy


 
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