KWSN Orbiting Fortress

Sir Papa Smurph · Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 3:00 pm Post subject: Gpu choices

I am thinking of getting some ATI cards to shrub MilkyWay.

What is the minimum card for this project and what is the sweet spot?

I can get 4850's for about $100 each & I now have a spare board with 4 double slot pciex slots

I can also get 4350's for less than $25.00
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JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

MW needs double precision, which the 4350 doesn't have.

Here's the list of Stream compatible cards:
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/ATIStreamSDK/pages/ATIStreamSystemRequirements.aspx

You need double precision for MW, single precision for Collatz.

You're looking for the highest # of Stream processors you can get. I think the consensus on MWs forum awhile back was the 4770 was the sweat spot for power consumption vs # of Stream processors. I do know that my HD4870 will do upwards of 90k/day if it's not trying to run other projects at all (because of the BOINC manager being worthless for ATI stuff).

The biggest problem with MW is that they're using an old crappy version of Brook, basically setup to work with the 8.12 Catalyst drivers. Most new cards, the 4770 and 4890 included, aren't properly supported by those drivers because they're old. And crap. Did I mention crap?

Newer drivers (9.x) require manual steps to setup for MW, and anything newer than ~9.5 or so will just crash constantly. Irritates me to no end, enough so that I'm currently debating just dropping MW. My video card is for video first, BOINC a distant second, and having to gimp my system with crappy old drivers is unacceptable. The fact that newer drivers causes it to crash and lockup all the time because of MWs crappy code is even less acceptable.

Unless you're looking to dedicate the machine just to MW, I'd steer clear personally. They're just points, after all.

Edit/Update:

There may be some hope yet. The 6.10.x BOINC Manager is finally ATI aware, but doing just as crappy a job scheduling with it. I'm going to bash it with my debts script to see if I can keep it running, because so far this is the best it's been.

Update 2: Still causes VPU crashes, just less often. Grr. There's some rumblings on the MW forum about updating to the newer Brook stuff soon. I hope they mean REALLY soon.
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Adam Alexander · Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:03 pm Post subject:

You can run MW with a 3850, but I wouldn't bother. My experience is that I got a lot of video driver errors with the 3850's so they're shut away in a cabinet for now. JerWa is right about scheduling. You really have to play around with Boinc to get it to cooperate with MW and a second project. I've had some success with Yoyo. Since you run Gimps and some other non-Boinc projects, you could use those machines to run MW and let your CPU keep working on the non-Boinc projects. I'm running four 4870's and a 4850. Well, I've had them running again for a few days now after the summer (mostly) shutdown.
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JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

6.10.3 is working REALLY well compared to the previous versions. There are still issues, but it's a big move in the right direction at least. Now if MW would update their code so the 9.x drivers would stop crashing every 30 minutes or so I could actually just let a machine run normally.
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Adam Alexander · Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 8:18 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the heads up.
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Currently running:

Active
Intel Core 2 Quad 9550

Reserves
Now down to one Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 that's in a tiny case and overheats if I actually try to use all four cores at the same time. On the other hand, it makes for a very nice home theater PC
Intel Core i7 CPU 920
AMD Athlon(tm) 7850

Sir Papa Smurph · Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2009 5:36 pm Post subject:

Well after reading this thread twice I think I will wait to build a Milky machine.

Yeah the credits are awesome but the hassle is more than I am willing to put up with. not to mention my electricity bill is running $200.00 a month now Confused

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a.k.a. Licentious of Borg.........Resistance Really is Futile.......
and a Really Hoopy Frood who always knows where his Towel is...

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Just as an aside, the new 9.9 Catalyst drivers seem to be helping a lot. Don't think I've seen a single VPU lock since upgrading.

Looks like they've also adjusted credits, so everyone will probably be falling down a bit soon. I was at about 1/second, now it's about .5/second. So, darn, my HD4870 will only outperform my 4 computers (the cheapest of which cost about as much as 4 HD4870s) combined by a factor of 10 instead of 20 now. Rolling Eyes

If 6.10.3 and 9.9 continue to play nice through the weekend it may finally be worth adding a second card.

FWIW, Collatz is not making this progress. 10.6.3 and 9.9 on my work machine still pukes all the time unfortunately. Might try it on my g/fs computer though. Hmm.
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JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

MW 0.2 released today, and I'm seeing some interesting behavior.

Used to be you'd want to run 3 WUs at a time for the best throughput. Seems like now (and the default settings bear this out as they've been changed from 3 to 1) it's optimized to run just 1 WU per GPU at a time.

With 6.10.3 (.4 is out, but I'm not hearing any good things) and MW 0.2 a single WU on my HD4870 takes between 38 and 50 seconds. Running 2 simultaneously takes over 2 minutes. Not seeing any gain running multiples any more. I'm also seeing temps on my video card that would indicate it is at as high a load at 1WU as it used to be with 3.

They say the credit drop is 20-30%, so we'll see how that bears out now that I've got a seemingly stable video driver (Catalyst 9.9), BOINC scheduler that's actually working properly (6.10.3), and a MW app (.20) that's newly optimized and working with the drivers properly. I know I was seeing more than a 50% cut in credit based on computation time, but it seems that may have been related to the changes in how many WUs should run well at at a time.

Update: Over 1 credit/second again on these WUs, dropped from 75 seconds for 53 credits to 47 seconds for 53 credits (but 1 at a time vs 3). I'll see what this actually does to my RAC over the next few days.
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