I've been away from actively working with SETI for probably a good 3-4 years now, and only have 1 system currently crunching, at my inlaws place, as they leave it on all the time and it doesn't get used by them all that much. I was there doing software updates to their computer last weekend, and when I brought it up, noticed that SETI's totals were falling off quickly. I checked it out and it had no WU's to process, and some note in the notes screen about 8.0 being required, and that it needed updating.

I did the update as best as I remembered, but it had been years since I did the last install, and it appears to be working properly best as I can tell. This kind of reignited my interest in getting back into it again, and I will probably use it soon on a new computer I am building, for burn in purposes initially, possibly permanently, depending how things go.

That being said, here are my questions. I am in the process of building my first new computer in probably 4+ years, with what I believe are the latest components: X-99 MB, 980TI video card, 16 gig ram, Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVME SSD drive, etc. I am trying to install Win 7 Ultimate on it, and have been struggling with getting it onto the SSD, which has lead to a bit of learning for me, and some questions.

First of all, the new acronym for me to learn about is UEFI, which may be part of my install struggles (d@mn security/protection protocols...! Think HDMI vs. DVI-D). The only 'old' part of the new rig is a Viewsonic VP2130B monitor, which I really like. It has a DVI-D interface, which obviously isn't UEFI compatible, and hence might be causing my issues of not getting a display after changing all my BIOS settings to allow it to install Win 7 off of the USB drive.

I spoke for almost 2 hours with Asus, and an hour with EVGA, and learned a couple things about setting up systems with the UEFI compliant components (which was supposed to work, but somehow still doesn't), and also something that has me a bit concerned. Which is why I am here asking for some advice.

I was told that all Nvidia cards starting with the 700 series on up Require a motherboard with a UEFI bios, and won't even work with non-UEFI motherboards. Remembering that I have been out of the system building scene for about 4 years, I find that amazing if true. I haven't taken the time to test my new card out on an older rig, but if that's accurate, it would be a crazy incompatibility, historic almost.

I would have thought I would have heard screaming all over the interwebs about this a couple years ago (as I haven't become a total Luddite), though one of the techs told me that most motherboards made since 2011 have that type of BIOS compatibility, so that may have been a long enough overlap to allay those concerns, but I had my doubts, because this is too huge a change to not cause some sort of uproar.

The reason for my concern is that if I ever get the chance to finally set up the farm I have the hardware for, since the boards are all at least 5-6 years old, and will be running headless on racks, with at least some running a newer and more "decent" GPU, I wouldn't be able to use newer cards in them.

The 2nd question is regarding the upgrades to the SETI/BOINC program that has just happened. I read a bit in a thread about there being issues with the results from (older?) Nvidia cards, some drivers, throwing invalid science but to the user decent looking results, and banning said cards from processing for SETI. As I have some of those older Nvidia based video cards, even going back to the GTX285/295 series, this concerns me.

Will I not be able to use the hardware that I have sitting there, once I get around to installing it? Is it driver dependent, or hardware? Is there a cutoff as to what will and won't work, or is it all still up in the air? Historically, it seemed that BOINC utilized whatever you 'brung, the only penalty was whatever $/WU you got out of the hardware, obviously less productivity/more expense in energy from the older cards, but they at least worked.

Is this now a brave new world where this paradigm is broken, and you need to have the latest and greatest to play, or is it that Nvidia has broken it so their hardware won't work for SETI? Just trying to get up to speed since I've been away and not paying close attention for so long.

Thanks for any enlightenment, guys, and good to be back!

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The issue you had with your monitor seems odd to me. I was using an old 19" Samsung from 2003 on my current system with UEFI until it went kaput.

Many new video cards have a switch on them to toggle between UEFI & BIOS. You might check for a switch or button on your new video cards. Also I found that those devices tend to ship switched for BIOS & the documentation indicates you can switch them to UEFI for faster booting. If a card requires UEFI I expect there should be something in the description/specs for it, but I have not seen any cards myself that say "Only works with UEFI".

I haven't read anything about banning whole ranges of GPUs. However there are some known driver versions that I believe have been blacklisted. For OpenCL apps there is often a minimum version for a GPU to get sent work. Which is normally where flagging a driver version happens.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Well, I can tell you that my system Prometheus - QX9650 CPU, EVGA GTX-750 TI SC GPU, reside on a 2008 MOBO from Gigabyte. MOBO is GA-EP45-UD3P, and is Version 1.6; BIOS is Upgraded to 11-23-2009 version v6.00PG. I don't believe this board has UEFI; but, I could be wrong, I got it used with the CPU. The GTX-750 TI SC works great on it.

Prometheus is on Win 7 Pro x64, currently. I will be Upgrading to Win 10 Pro, soon. (Have made clone/image of Win 7 Drive already, in preparation to Upgrade to Win 10 Pro.)

[EDIT] Also, I'm using an HP 2009m 21" DVI-D Monitor, attached to the GTX-750 TI SC.


TL

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TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos

If u at start, i can suggest u to use drivers version 356.39 (beta), it has Vulkan API , one sideeffect is that your cpu usage at crunshing gpu tasks will be halfed. But get the same points without any error.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=79142

See this thread.

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The issue you had with your monitor seems odd to me. I was using an old 19" Samsung from 2003 on my current system with UEFI until it went kaput.

Many new video cards have a switch on them to toggle between UEFI & BIOS. You might check for a switch or button on your new video cards. Also I found that those devices tend to ship switched for BIOS & the documentation indicates you can switch them to UEFI for faster booting. If a card requires UEFI I expect there should be something in the description/specs for it, but I have not seen any cards myself that say "Only works with UEFI".

I haven't read anything about banning whole ranges of GPUs. However there are some known driver versions that I believe have been blacklisted. For OpenCL apps there is often a minimum version for a GPU to get sent work. Which is normally where flagging a driver version happens.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll dig further into that with EVGA, it was quite strange that's for sure, but I am getting a Samsung 40" 4k TV to use with the new computer, which certainly has HDMI, so we'll see.

I hope that the older cards have acceptable drivers which will work, as I know that they stopped driver support with XP a bit ago, so if the required drivers for my 'geriatric' cards don't meet the OS specs (Linux, Win 7? Still up in the air which way to go with that one) because the mfg stopped supporting them for being too old, they might truly be at end of life for SETI, which honestly is the only reason I still have them. Is there a thread that has the Ok, not Ok spelled out as to determine go/no go fairly easily on card/driver combos, or ones that won't get work if not up to date? The hazards with attempting to use basically obsolete kit are rearing their ugly heads it appears...

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Al,

The Driver I'm on for the 750 TI SC is 353.30; and is working perfectly. (Same for the GTX-760 on Exeter - AMD A6-6400K system on Win XP Pro x64.)


TL

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TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos

Al,

The Driver I'm on for the 750 TI SC is 353.30; and is working perfectly. (Same for the GTX-760 on Exeter - AMD A6-6400K system on Win XP Pro x64.)


TL

Thanks for the advice, I will use that version on the newer cards for sure, as I have multiple licenses of XP Pro 64 as well. Unless of course there is a crunching advantage to using either Linux or Win 7 on a lower end system? Now I will need to do some research on the older ones, not sure if/when they stopped supporting the 2xx series cards, but Google is your friend! lol

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...at least one of the top crunchers is still running a number of XP computers.


The Nvidia 2xx cards are getting very long in the tooth, and are almost at the stage of better used as room heaters than for crunching. The support from Nvidia is certainly on the downward life-slope - A '750 will comfortably out perform a '280 and use far less power in doing so.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Yeah, I kinda know that, it's just that they're bought and paid for, but I could imagine that the output between the 2 would be pretty significant... You think 2x? 3x? Not to mention the cost to run them, even if I do have solar panels on my roof. Is there a big difference between the 600 series and the 700 series in terms of performance? I haven't checked Fleabay on it yet, so not sure on the cost of any of them, but I suppose one can always throw money at the problem. Come On Powerball! lol

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The big step was between 6xx and 7xx - my pair of 980s comfortably beat the pair of 690s that I used to run (and those were dual GPUs on a single assembly).
From memory my '250 was only about twice as fast as the CPU and would only run one task at a time, each of the pair of '970s takes about about a fifth of the time while running three tasks at a time - so say fifteen times as fast as what was a top end processor only a few years back!

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

So, in the scheme of things, if I am replacing those cards with newer ones, it would make more sense to go with the 700 series cards over the 600 series, even if they are a bit more expensive on the used market? Is there one that would hit a sweet spot in terms of $ per performance? 750, 770, 780? Can't afford to break the bank, but also want the one that would make the most sense. Thoughts?

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Or even a thread someone may have done, or a link to one outside of the forum here that someone has done, which might show relative performance between the different cards and BOINC?

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For me the The GTX 680, 780 and 980 have all been exceptional value when considering the initial cost versus performance per Watt. Retired ones include my 9600GSOs, GTX 260, 560ti, basically all low-mid cards. The GTX 480 I also retired and gave away, due to noise and power cost, though I know SciManStev runs three of those to keep the snakes warm :D

So in General the upper end cards have worked out best for me, while pushing low to mid range cards more of a hassle and less efficient in the longer term.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

So, in the scheme of things, if I am replacing those cards with newer ones, it would make more sense to go with the 700 series cards over the 600 series, even if they are a bit more expensive on the used market? Is there one that would hit a sweet spot in terms of $ per performance? 750, 770, 780? Can't afford to break the bank, but also want the one that would make the most sense. Thoughts?

The 750 Ti is one of the best cards in terms of performance per watt. Given a new EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti SC is currently $110 makes hard not to choose. Compared to the 8800 GT it is about 3 time as fast and uses about 40% less power.
For the 670 I think a GTX 970 might be more suitable replacement. Depending on your budget. A 970 might be more money than a 770 upfront but it is 145w and a 770 is 230w. If you run your machine 24/7 that is 62KW/h less a month for the 970. With my electric rates that is about $11 a month, or $132 a year, less for the 970.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

This table of raw GFLOPS power for AMD/Nvidia cards is helpful to see where a specific generation/series card falls among its peers. FP32/FP64 GFLOPS Table

Might be helpful in determining how much RAC/watt each card could theoretically generate. Results would also depend on OS and CPU/memory backing up the GPU.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

GPUs all the way. I would get only GPUs, they rock and your PDU will rock too.

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The 750 Ti is one of the best cards in terms of performance per watt.

It's awesome IMHO.

My GTX 460 & 560Ti were running at 90-95% GPU load, so they were very close to their 200W rating.

My GTX 750Tis don't crunch as much work per hour as the older cards (optimised apps still being worked on), but they do come close, while their power use is only 60-65% of their maximum of 60W.

That's 40W per card, producing only slightly less work per hour than my old cards which were using around 190W.
You can run (almost) 5* GTX 750Tis, for the same amount of power required for just 1* GTX460 or GTX560Ti.
Like I said, awesome.

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Grant
Darwin NT

This table of raw GFLOPS power for AMD/Nvidia cards is helpful to see where a specific generation/series card falls among its peers. FP32/FP64 GFLOPS Table

Might be helpful in determining how much RAC/watt each card could theoretically generate. Results would also depend on OS and CPU/memory backing up the GPU.

Thanks for the link, so for SETI/BOINC, is the FP32 or the FP64 number more relevant?

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So, in the scheme of things, if I am replacing those cards with newer ones, it would make more sense to go with the 700 series cards over the 600 series, even if they are a bit more expensive on the used market? Is there one that would hit a sweet spot in terms of $ per performance? 750, 770, 780? Can't afford to break the bank, but also want the one that would make the most sense. Thoughts?

The 750 Ti is one of the best cards in terms of performance per watt. Given a new EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti SC is currently $110 makes hard not to choose. Compared to the 8800 GT it is about 3 time as fast and uses about 40% less power.
For the 670 I think a GTX 970 might be more suitable replacement. Depending on your budget. A 970 might be more money than a 770 upfront but it is 145w and a 770 is 230w. If you run your machine 24/7 that is 62KW/h less a month for the 970. With my electric rates that is about $11 a month, or $132 a year, less for the 970.

Ahh, decisions, decisions... According to the chart in the link posted here, the 970 does about 4x the work (if the chart is an accurate predictor of actual performance) than the 750 does, at 3x the price, using 2x+ the wattage?

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This table of raw GFLOPS power for AMD/Nvidia cards is helpful to see where a specific generation/series card falls among its peers. FP32/FP64 GFLOPS Table

Might be helpful in determining how much RAC/watt each card could theoretically generate. Results would also depend on OS and CPU/memory backing up the GPU.

Thanks for the link, so for SETI/BOINC, is the FP32 or the FP64 number more relevant?

FP32, and to some extent memory speeds if available. Compote efficiency single instance, for most GPU applications here, works out to about 5% of theoretical peak (which for GPUs is about 'half-optimised'), therefore you can reasonably estimate expected GFlops at 1/20th of theoretical peak, and give +/- 20% slop to allow for system and running conditions and application. Multiple instances will increase the total efficiency within reason, to the region of 10% [With current app technologies].

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.