Folding Forum

What version of the Nvidia driver are you using - since this is a newly assembled AMD rig?

Link takes you to a 3-page NV GPU folding failure/crash thread. Lots of troubles in using newest NV drivers. the 290.53 beta drivers from December 2011 seem to be working OK - other drivers don't.

it happened last week when i installed the driver from the manufacturer CD 280.xx. Then this time, i downloaded and installed the latest one 296.10 from nvidia website.

Does it happen on all gtx460? or only MSI GTX460 or just my card?

You can take a look at this post in the GPU folding failure/crash thread from yesterday. You may have hit the driver cycle at an unfortunate moment. It seems the 296.10 driver is the kiss of death for folding. With this driver, it's not only your card.

Re: GPU folding failure/crash
by Jimboc » Mon Mar 26, 2012 1:24 pm

Hi everyone,

Over the weekend I upgraded from Nvidia driver version 290.53 to 296.10. I can also confirm that the WUs are now also failing for me as previously described by other forum members.

I have posted a detailed description of the issue in the Nvidia driver 296.10 Official feedback thread. I have also referenced 2 other Nvidia forum members reporting the same issue. This is a driver issue. Earlier the same day, driver 290.53 was folding flawlessly.

And, here's another one from Jesse_V: GPU folding failure/crash

Re: GPU folding failure/crash
by Jesse_V » Thu Feb 23, 2012 8:22 am

Thanks for the responses. I'll install the older driver. MtM, that does make sense, but when Nvidia kept going on about better game performance and efficiency, I just translated it to increases in PPD. How odd that it had the opposite effect, especially because this isn't a beta driver or anything. Guess I learned! I'll find out what version it was. Thanks again.

EDIT: Driver version is 8.17.12.9573 which was released on 2/9/12. The driver filename that I downloaded is 295.73-desktop-win7-winvista-64bit-english-whql.exe

EDIT2: I found a page on Nvidia's website which showed all recommended drivers:
GeForce 295.73 Driver WHQL-295.73-February 21, 2012
GeForce 285.62 Driver WHQL-285.62-October 24, 2011
GeForce 280.26 Driver WHQL-280.26-August 9, 2011
GeForce 275.33 Driver WHQL-275.33-June 1, 2011
GeForce/ION Driver v270.61 WHQL-270.61-April 18, 2011
GeForce Driver v266.66 WHQL-266.66-January 25, 2011
So I'll be installing 285.62 since that seems to be the one that I had before. Things should go well I hope.

MSi provide their own drivers for their hardware. Whether these are simply approved by MSi or partially / wholey re-written due to differing hardware remains to be seen. Either way I would recommend performing a clean driver installation with an approved driver:
http://www.msi.com/product/vga/N460GTX- ... ver&os=All

I notice driver version 280.x doesn't appear on the downloads list for this card. Just so you know: For a short while I was folding on an MSi N460GTX 1GD5/OC Cyclone on an 890FX chipset mobo under Windows 7 with no problems. (All be it, mine is a Phenom II, not an FX CPU).

I will try on the 2 drivers. MSI 285.58 and nvidia 290.53

OTOH, my amd fx cpu is folding 8011, with 700 credit... which is quite low, right?

The first thing I would do, is make sure the 3D clocks are forced on permanently. use the Nvidia control panel (right click on the desktop). Go to 3D settings->Manage 3D settings->power management mode->Prefer maximum performance. What that does is keep the card from clocking down to save power.

Next, I'd install an OC'ing utility so I could watch the clock, %GPU usage, and temp in the systray. I prefer MSI Afterburner. I don't want you to adjust any card parameters till you can ID what is actually going on. My purpose is setting it up so you can dynamically monitor whats going on and see if you can see a pattern such as the clock drops after playing a game or after the machine goes to sleep.

With this in mind, after you install Afterburner click settings and pick the monitoring tab. Click the check-marks on GPU1 usage, GPU1 temperature, and GPU1 core clock so that the checkmarks show rather than being grayed out. Next, on each of those when you are highlighting each of them make sure that the show in systray box is check-marked at the bottom of the window and that its color is such that you can read the numbers in the systray.

Hopefully that will help

P.S. The base credit, for GPU WU's, will always be constant for a given project regardless of the speed of the card. PPD or TPF is what you need to pay attention because those incorporates the time factor.

superkingkong wrote:. . .OTOH, my amd fx cpu is folding 8011, with 700 credit... which is quite low, right?

Are you aware that the mainboard you are using doesn't have native bulldozer (FX) CPU support? The 890 chipsets support AM3 whilst the 990 chipsets are AM3+. There appears to be a BIOS update available from MSi's support pages . . . Although if you bought your board very recently they've probably already performed a BIOS update on it.

800 points per day is low, even for base PPD before any bonuses. Have you disabled cool 'n' quiet, C1E and SVM support in the BIOS? I've never known these to effect folding before, but it would certainly seem that your system is entering a low power state and disabling them may be the next best course of action.

- - - EDIT - - -

A few more to try: Go to control panel > system and security > power options, then set a plan where the display and computer never sleep. Go into the advanced power settings and find the setting for PCI Express, make sure the "Link State Power Management" setting is off. Also check "Processor Management" option to see that the system cooling policy is set to active not passive. Don't change the maximum and minimum CPU usage as that can screw things up. Whilst still in the advanced options, go to sleep and check that the "sleep after" and "hibernate after" settings are set to "never".

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm using XP, I couldn't find the power management mode in nVidia Control Panel. It has only basic options in XP Control Panel - System.

I did some thorough googling, and found a post within this forum.

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=20160

After i disabled the screen saver, it seems that after few hours, it is still constantly staying at 720mhz. I'll try to look at it tonight, maybe after like 6 hours.

Hmmm, looks like there is a problem with gtx460, well, basically it's the drivers fault, but without drivers, the card is totally unusable. I have the gtx560ti on another intel system. No problem at all after initial setup.