Folding at Home: Video cards too hot?

[Insidious]

With summer heat and budgets stretched by those AC bills, lots of us had to re-think how we crunch with our video cards.

F@H had provided us relief with those Core14 Work Units, but they became pretty scarce and up came those temperatures again with the older Core11 WUs.

Stanford has finally received our message and now has a new Core11 available that allows throttling of the GPU which lets the crunching resemble the cooler Core14 folding.

You can get the new core here Stop your client, replace the core and now it allows you to set a windows environment variable; Read how to do it here.... very simple!

By setting the value of the variable, you can decide how much of the time the client 'idles' by percentage and put those temps exactly where you want them without turning it off completely. (setting for 15% idle time makes a significant difference in temperatures of the GPU... you can do more or less to suit yourself)

Happy Folding!

-Sid

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

That is awesome that they are implementing that. Hopefully other projects will consider doing the same, as that would be very useful. My office was at 79 degrees yesterday afternoon, and it is only the beginning of summer. This summer is going to be brutal with the little amount of rain central Texas has received.

 

[Freewolf]

Pensacola broke a record Monday with a high of 101 degrees actual temp, heat index was over 110 so this is a good thing for Folders. Thanks for the info Sid!

 

[petrusbroder]

Thanks for the info!

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is good news!

 

[Drsignguy]

Now THIS is what the Dr needed! Sweet Sid, thanks a bunch

 

[Insidious]

I've been having good luck with it so far. Ended up with mine set at 20% idle. It costs me some PPD, but not as much as having them off.

Anyone else tried it yet?

-Sid

 

[Drsignguy]

Just starting to work on them now.....




EDIT:

Been running for the last 50 minutes and it seem to have dropped my temps by 8c - 10c. It has also allowed me to drop my fan percentage from 86% to 70%, with a much more noticeable reduction in sound.....

 

[Assimilator1]

What idle % did you set?

Hey Sid, good to hear they heard & gave a fix .

 

[Drsignguy]

I set mine at 15%.

 

[Denithor]

How much impact is this expected to have on ppd versus 0% idle?

How exactly does it work? Idle the card for x minutes between runs, give a short idle period at some interval during a run, ... ??

I will definitely check this out tonight - my room stays a good 10F warmer than the rest of the house because of my 2x GTX 260 & 1x 8800GTS crunching away constantly.

 

[Insidious]

Originally posted by: Denithor
How much impact is this expected to have on ppd versus 0% idle?

How exactly does it work? Idle the card for x minutes between runs, give a short idle period at some interval during a run, ... ??

I will definitely check this out tonight - my room stays a good 10F warmer than the rest of the house because of my 2x GTX 260 & 1x 8800GTS crunching away constantly.

Not sure exactly how it works. It is slow enough increments that if you watch your temperatures (Rivatuner or GPU-Z) you will see the 'ripple' effect of idling.

I think the PPD impact is pretty much a linear relationsip with your idle time. ie: if you set idle to 10%, you should probably expect to see 90% of your unlimited PPD.

-Sid