Which Programs Should I Use?

[Jake112]

I'm not very active on F@H, but I want to do my part and let my extra CPU cycles go to a good cause. I'm pretty computer literate but a lot of the scientific stuff goes way over my head. Basically, I'd like to know what I should do to optimize my output for F@H.

Computer specs:

Windows XP Professional SP3
Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
4GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3650

It's definitely not an enthusiast or gamer rig but it's not too shabby and does everything I need. Anyway, because I have a quad core, for about two months I was running four copies of the regular client (after watching my CPU usage I found that one client really only used one core). Now, I have switched to using the GPU client at the same time as the SMP client. Both are configured to get the largest WU's they can, and the SMP client is running with the "-advmethods" tag.

Is there anything I should be doing? Several other students in my school are running F@H, and even though I have many more WU's completed than they do, they have an entire extra digit more than I do in terms of points. I've read all the literature on the site, I know that there are differences in point values...but whether I'm running the regular client once, four times, or the SMP and GPU clients simultaneously with all of the configurations for more WU's, I can't seem to catch up to their number of points! I know that the purpose of this isn't just to win a race, but I'm wondering if the reason I'm not outputting as much as fast, or not getting the bigger jobs, is because I'm doing something wrong.

Let me know if you need any more information.

[bruce]

If you don't plan any hardware upgrades or experimentation with Linux, the SMP client plus the GPU client is a good combination for your machine.

You can gain as much as about 20% if you're willing to do some experimental tweaking, by reducing the amount of CPU time used by the GPU client, leaving more for the SMP client. There are a couple of discussions in the ATI forum (search on the keywords environment and variable).

[jrweiss]

Have you set your Environment Variables for the GPU client? That will likely increase your GPU load and decrease GPU use of the CPU core. Much info in this thread, mainly starting around page 13: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=9162&start=180