Question about Power settings!

[Valenten]

Hello I am new to this and am curious if there is a way to set individual power settings for my CPU and GPU. Like for my CPU i would like to have it at low and my GPU have it at medium. Is that possible with the current client or no? If it is how would I go about setting it up!

[Jesse_V]

This is possible for the CPU and is technically possible for the GPU as well, but not as easy. For the CPU, open up FAHControl. You should be able to do this by right-clicking on the Folding@home icon in the taskbar down by the clock, then clicking "Advanced Control". From there, click on the Configure button in the upper-left corner, go to the Slots tab, select the CPU slot, and change the number of CPU cores down to 1 or 2. When you hit Save, the workunit should pause and resume using the lower level.

For the GPU, you only can really turn it on or off, but there is an advanced setting called "tmax" and "twait" for Nvidia GPUs. This setting can temporarily pause and unpause the GPU based on temperature. My thinking was the GPU could get to work, the temperature would rise above a specific setting, it would pause and cool down, then start up again, thus turning on or off in a cycle. This is an advanced setup and its been several years since I messed with it, so I'm not 100% how you should set that if you wanted to go that route.

[Valenten]

This is exactly what I was looking for I set my CPU to 3 or 4 since I personally have a Ryzen 1700 and it was at 14 with it set to medium before lol. My GPU im not too worried about really but that Tmax and twait would be intersting to see if someone else could remember how to set that up so i could set it up so my gpu can take a break every now and again.

[Joe_H]

Better than using the Tmax and twait in the client would be to use an utility to set a power limit on your GPU. Those settings in the client were more intended to be failsafe to prevent overheating, but as I recall did not work that well as a throttle for the GPU. A number of persons have posted on setting a power limit in the last year.

[Paragon]

To keep things happy with the GPU, you probably don't want it thermally cycling. This causes thermal stresses in the card (hot-->cold-->hot-->cold--hot), where literally the components on the PCB are expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, etc. It's much better to just let it sit at a constant temperature. In this way, Folding is actually nicer to graphics cards than gaming.

For many graphics cards, can adjust the power limit on the GPU using a driver tool like MSI Afterburner. This will clock down the GPU a bit to cool it off (still running at a constant temp, just a few degrees cooler than it was at 100% power). It's much healthier and can boost the efficiency of the system (PPD/Watt)

https://greenfoldingathome.com/2019/02/ ... wer-limit/

[Valenten]

I guess my only other big concern is my cpu temp. Right now it seems to be sitting around 68-70 C. Is there anything I can do about that? It is lower once I lowered the number of cores it was using. Just curious since I like having cooler temps normally but I know this is putting a fairly big load on my cpu cores.

[Jesse_V]

I guess my only other big concern is my cpu temp. Right now it seems to be sitting around 68-70 C. Is there anything I can do about that? It is lower once I lowered the number of cores it was using. Just curious since I like having cooler temps normally but I know this is putting a fairly big load on my cpu cores.

That's largely dependent on your CPU cooler. If you have a small air cooler, the temperatures will be higher. Liquid cooling is one of the best routes out there. Other than hardware changes, you could lower the number of cores, like you said.

[Valenten]

I guess my only other big concern is my cpu temp. Right now it seems to be sitting around 68-70 C. Is there anything I can do about that? It is lower once I lowered the number of cores it was using. Just curious since I like having cooler temps normally but I know this is putting a fairly big load on my cpu cores.

That's largely dependent on your CPU cooler. If you have a small air cooler, the temperatures will be higher. Liquid cooling is one of the best routes out there. Other than hardware changes, you could lower the number of cores, like you said.

Yea thats what I figured. I am running the stock cpu cooler that it came with which does wonders normally but I guess ive never really put it under a big load before like this even with the gaming that I do

[Jesse_V]

Yeah, welcome to optimized computing where programmers have spent the past 20 years optimizing the cores to get as many instructions through as possible. It's tougher on the hardware than many benchmark tools.

[kiore]

Cooling.. I have frequently resorted to removing the sides off my case, and when I built 4x GPU rigs in the past I just ran them on a test bench as GPUs get really really hot.
Blow the dust out, use 3rd party apps like Afterburner to set power limits for GPUs and speed up fans, use the F@H Advanced Control control slider for CPUs or reduce thread number with the configure function. eg I have a 8/16 core CPU but run just 6/12 cores to reduce heat even though I have a high flow case with a serious aftermarket CPU cooler because it shares the case with a high performance GPU. Intel CPUs tolerate a lot more heat and am generally unconcerned with temps of 80C, AMD ones I prefer to be no higher than 60C.