Folding Power: Medium Question

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Blue_Collar
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2020 11:33 pm

Folding Power: Medium Question

Post by Blue_Collar »

Morning All,

So I read that the Medium Power slider settings is supposed to do ~75% CPU Utilization. For me, it seems to still be using almost 91-98%. Is there something obvious I'm missing? Here is a picture of my control panel and HW Monitor.

Medium:
https://imgur.com/a/PrCqMLK

It's not a big deal, but I just wondered in case there was a tweak somewhere I could make that would bring that down a bit. If not, its fine.

Thanks, and happy folding =)

-Blue
Nathan_P
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Re: Folding Power: Medium Question

Post by Nathan_P »

Hi

Some of teh load will also be caused by the 1070 that is also folding. If you want to measure it more accuratly pause the GPU slot and see what it drops to - also shut down anything else that may be running in the background
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JimboPalmer
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Location: Greenwood MS USA

Re: Folding Power: Medium Question

Post by JimboPalmer »

Welcome to Folding@Home!

Light uses 50% of your Threads (F@H will call them CPUs)
Medium uses all but one
Full uses them all.

Back in the day when a big PC supported 4 threads, all but one, was 75%
Today you may well have 16 threads, and 15/16 is almost the same as 16/16ths.

But we can have much finer control today.

You posted a screen but I can't make it big enough to read how many CPUs F@H thinks you have, sorry.

In your lower right task bar you see the F@H molecule icon, click on that. (you may need to click on an Up Arrow to see it ^)

the second item in this menu should be Advanced Control, click that

A screen should pop up , we want a tab called System Info. click it
You may need to scroll but as I tells you info you should see CPUs: and a number
If you want 3/4 of your CPUs to fold lets do that math now

Now find a button to the left named Configure and click it
This pop up should have a tab called Slots, click it
Now we should see a field called cpu (and perhaps gpu, but you did not mention it) click cpu and then click edit.

This screen has a option to choose the number of CPUs to fold with, by default ot is -1 which lets the software decide, but you can type the number of CPUs you want to fold with.
Now press save and close and you are done.

F@H can shift down immediately, but can only use more CPUs at the start of a new Work Unit.
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Blue_Collar
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2020 11:33 pm

Re: Folding Power: Medium Question

Post by Blue_Collar »

*Homer style D'oh*

I paused the GPU from the control panel and CPU went down to ~77%. When I would toggle it to "Full" all the cores would go up to 100%, so I figured Medium Mode was working in some capacity. I just didn't put 2 and 2 together on the GPU folding have some CPU overhead, which makes complete sense.

I will leave it where it is for now, and maybe down the road I will tinker with the info you gave Jimbo.

Thanks for the replies and happy folding.

-Blue
Blue_Collar
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2020 11:33 pm

Re: Folding Power: Medium Question

Post by Blue_Collar »

I couldn't resist messing with it before work...I have an i7-7700k, so its 7 core. I changed it to utilize 5/7, and my CPU is riding at a nice 66-70% with the GPU Folding at the same time.

Thanks Jimbo for the walkthrough on how to change that setting. Worked perfectly for fine tuning.
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