Folding Forum

Hi, is there a way to limit GPU (not CPU) usage trough FAH control or some driver utilities?
Right now its running at constant 100% producing high noise, heat, and electric bill.

Win 8
FAH 7.4.4
Radeon R7 260X

Currently through the FAH client, no. The nature of GPU processing is it is either running or not. Prior attempts to limit GPU usage through the client were unsatisfactory, and potentially damaging to the GPU as the method used cycled the card repeatedly from full to low power. Those methods are no longer implemented in the client.

Indirectly you can limit usage by down-clocking your GPU to a lower speed. That will use less power and put out less heat. Some cards are unstable below certain clock speeds, so you may have to do some testing to see if that is an issue for yours.

It's still early, but here are my first results with ATI Radeon R7.

After bringing down all the available settings except for the fan in the AMD OverDrive tab found under AMD Catalyst Control Center, the estimated TPF has increased 4x, thus assuming that GPU down-clocking has been performed successfully. System is stable.

Note: 1) a complete system shut down was necessary for the effects to take place; 2) temperatures remain high, further testing is necessary.

By default, the folding client reserves one CPU core to feed data to the GPU slot. If you manually configure the client to use all CPU cores, the GPU slot will be slightly starved of Data and will run a bit slower, thus should run a little cooler. The effect is highly subjective based on your hardware of choice. YMMV.