gpu or cpu?

Questions and Answers : Windows : gpu or cpu?
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Message 2033411 - Posted: 21 Feb 2020, 22:33:54 UTC

Quick question is it better if my processing is done using cpu or gpu ? And how can I set up which one I want to use I figured it wpuld be cpu but mine is set up using gpu . Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated
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Message 2033454 - Posted: 22 Feb 2020, 2:03:54 UTC

With your computers hidden it's impossible to offer any useful advice, other than use both. Unless it's an iGPU in which case don't use it at all. Unless It's an older system with low clock speeds & very few cores.
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Message 2033535 - Posted: 22 Feb 2020, 15:45:15 UTC - in response to Message 2033411.  

Thanks for the info ,and how would I go about making my computer setup public?
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Message 2033567 - Posted: 22 Feb 2020, 21:28:24 UTC - in response to Message 2033535.  

By using your Seti@home preferences.
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=project
Should SETI@home show your computers on its web site?

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

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Message 2033702 - Posted: 23 Feb 2020, 23:49:54 UTC - in response to Message 2033411.  

Done, thanks for the help and let me pose the question again please
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Message 2033728 - Posted: 24 Feb 2020, 7:08:18 UTC
Last modified: 24 Feb 2020, 7:09:50 UTC

Ok, it's a good mid-range CPU & mid-range video card. Personally i would use both the CPU & GPU- the GPU will pump out most of the work, but having 6 cores means the CPU will still be able to put out plenty of work.

If you have a good water cooler, or a really good air cooler on the CPU i would suggest using the Lunatics installer as it's AVX CPU application can get 30% more work out of the CPU compared to the Stock application. But without water cooling (or a really good air cooler) i wouldn't use the AVX application as all that extra work really does make the CPU work hard & without really good cooling it will run way hotter than you would want it to.
The other drawback with the Lunatics installer is if/when a new science application is released it will be up to you to download & install it. Whereas running stock, if the application changes then then BOINC Manager will just download it & start using it. No mucking around required on your part.

Using Lunatics or stock, there are some command line values you can use to significantly improve the output from the video card, and by reserving a CPU core to support the GPU (if you continue to
use the CPU to process work as well) that will help the GPU output as well as CPU output.
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Message 2034091 - Posted: 26 Feb 2020, 21:38:40 UTC - in response to Message 2033728.  

Quick question is it better if my processing is done using cpu or gpu ? And how can I set up which one I want to use I figured it wpuld be cpu but mine is set up using gpu . Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated
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Message 2034096 - Posted: 26 Feb 2020, 22:20:04 UTC

Given you have a GTX1660 GPU and an i5 CPU and are running Windows 10 there is little doubt that the GPU will be substantially faster than the i5.
By default BOINC will allow SETI to use both, so initially there is is little to do to get the GPU working, and indeed the GPU is being used, and is using the best Windows stock application.
There are two possible next steps, either reduce the amount of work being don by the CPU, this is fairly easy to do:
Go to the "advanced" view in the BOINC GUI and select Options from the menu, then the Computing Preferences tab (this will bring up a new window with four tabs) select the Computing tab. Near the top of this tab there is a line "Use at most x% of the CPUs" - change x to 83% (default is 100%). Doing this will allow the GPU to have access to the CPU resources it needs without conflicts between the CPU and GPU (I notice from your results the clock time for a CPU task is about double that of the actual CPU time - this indicates that your system is struggling for resources, the two figures should be more or less the same). Save the change, and check on the Task tab - you should see one GPU task running along with five CPU tasks - there may be 1 task waiting, that is normal just after releasing a CPU thread for the GPU. If you watch you may notice that the estimated time to completion on all tasks is now dropping at more than 1 second per second.
You can try other values of x to see if there is any rounding effect cutting the CPU threads by two instead of one, or none.
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Message 2034158 - Posted: 27 Feb 2020, 6:21:35 UTC - in response to Message 2034091.  

Quick question is it better if my processing is done using cpu or gpu ? And how can I set up which one I want to use I figured it would be cpu but mine is set up using gpu . Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated
The GPU will outperform the CPU by a long way (depending on the application and hardware- a WU that takes 1hr 30min for the CPU to process can be done in under 1 minute on a GPU), however you do have 6 CPU cores there so you might as well make use of them as well. No point having them sitting there doing nothing when they can contribute a significant amount of work.
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Questions and Answers : Windows : gpu or cpu?


 
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