Same folding performance at either 50% or 100% CPU usage

[Mr J]

Hello dear folders,

I am new to folding, finding it fascinating and keen to contribute as much as possible so after initially running on full (100% cpu usage) all the time I realised something when playing around.

After examining how performance changes as I switch between Full/Medium/Low, I realise there are none.

I am observing the PPD, TPF, time it takes to reach 0.1% completion (if I time it manually) and it doesn't matter which speed setting I am on, it won't have an effect on any of these.

I am monitoring CPU usage with OCCT and at I am at 50% low / medium 75% / full 100% of total cpu usage and the same is shown in windows task manager for the F@H.exe. I tried monitoring for longer and longer periods of time and still noticed nothing change. I decided to post here for that reason for the hopes of somebody to enlighten me

This confuses me as I am wondering where the extra 50% usage is going, except added heat and power drawn at this moment I wouldn't know.

My main query is that I am assuming my CPU is only being utilized 50% max somehow, and I wish to get it up to a true 100%.

I am using the 7.3.6 client on windows 7, with a i5 4670k processor, I have just the 1 folding slot with cpu threads set to -1 letting the client automatically choose. Actually all the setting are default except for that the checkpoint is 5 minutes . I am on my second WU.

Thank you for reading, wishing you all successful and continuous folds, after recently upgrading from a 5 year old unit and only just finding out about folding, I have a lot to learn yet, so it could very well be a simple error on my side.

Any thoughts or anything to say in general is more than welcome and well appreciated.

[Jesse_V]

Here's some relevent documentation that might be helpful to you:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/V7- ... tion#ntoc3
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/V7- ... iate#ntoc5

[Joe_H]

If you could post your log file, that would help us in figuring out what is going on with folding on your system. Directions on how to locate the log file and posting it are available here.

[bruce]

To estimate the points, the client needs to estimate the Time Per Frame. To establish a meaningful average TPF, the client normally takes the mean of three 1% frames. Whatever projections you're seeing for 0.1% changes are strictly estimates and not based on brief periods of 50% or 75% or 100%. You'll need to run your measurements over a period of several hours.

FAH is designed to use UNUSED resources, so it yields to anything else running on the computer. Most foreground activity uses very little of the resources that FAH uses but since they have priority, it is possible that FAH's performance may vary.

If your computer shares floating point processing between pairs of cores (Intel HyperThreading or AMD Modules) you'll generally find that the first 50% of what your OS calls CPU time is a lot more valuable than the second 50%. You'll get more processing done as you increase the number of cores, but it's not going to be proportional. The only exception to that rule is that if something other than FAH uses one or more cores continuously for long periods of time, allocating that/those same core(s) to FAH will have a negative effect.