Folding Forum

Hi all,

I recently upgraded to a radeon hd 6870 from my previous card 9800gt. i also have a phenom 2 1055t (slight oc) and 8 gigs ram, and im running the v7 client. when i was doing gpu folding on my 9800 gt, it took no resources from the cpu (which is folding smp units). but now that i have the 6870 (stock) at least one of the 6 cores on my 1055t is folding a gpu unit. task manger shows 16% cpu utilization by the gpu core and 80% by the smp core, also amd overdrive shows the gpu jump back and forth between 90 and 99% gpu resource utilization. this is slowing down the smp folding, yet probably speeding up the gpu folding. why is this happening? is there anything i can do to stop it from happening?

One way would be to decrease the number of cores being used by the SMP client. There have been reports that smp:5 can cause some projects to fail so I would change to smp:4.

You might see a slight increase in overall PPD.

Your gpu resource utilization can be caused by the project you're running. For example, there is currently quite a difference between 803x and 764x projects.

If you want to utilize your 6th core you could always add a CPU(Uniprocessor) slot.

Ensure that the Fahcore Priority setting (configure>advanced) is set to Slightly Higher.

As a general rule, GPUs from AMD need one dedicated CPU core and GPUs from NV do not. (Actually the numbers are not exactly 1.000 and 0.000, but you don't have much choice about the fractional values.)

changing the priority to slightly higher didnt help, and neither did cpu affinity lock on the actual client. should i try affinity lock through task manager or just decrease the percent of cpu utilization down from 100?

Also thanks for the info about amd gpus taking up a core. but if the gpu is using a core shouldnt the process using the resources be amd catalyst or something amd related instead of F@H's core 16?

Decreasing the CPU Utilization down from 100 will have almost no effect. Reduce the number of SMP threads, like I said.

Setting priority and affinity also cannot help. You're asking your CPU for125% of what it can do and allowing one thread to interrupt the other doesn't magically give your CPU 105 minutes in every hour.

how do i reduce the number of smp threads? I have 1 smp:6 slot and 1 gpu slot. i dont know how to change it from smp:6 to smp:4 or change the number of threads

waterboi wrote:how do i reduce the number of smp threads? I have 1 smp:6 slot and 1 gpu slot. i dont know how to change it from smp:6 to smp:4 or change the number of threads

You got it simply change from SMP:6 to SMP:4. The number is the number of threads that will be used.

Click on configure, then the slots tab, then double click on the smp slot.

Change the number of CPUs from -1 (or 6) in the smp box to 4.

ok i changed it. thanks everyone