Folding Forum

Disclaimer: I understand I could just as easily DO this in theory but I don't have enough cables to pull it off yet and don't want to buy anything before I know for sure I can pull this off.

I was wondering if anyone else has any experience using one GPU for folding while the other is used for daily work or gaming. I have an extra 470 I'm not using and would love to get as much use out of as possible but I'm not sure the software recognizes multiple GPUs or will section off workloads to a designated card. Can I replug in my old graphics card and use that for folding while the new graphics card gets used for gaming or work?

If your hardware allows multiple GPUs to be connected, yes, you can do that. FAH recognizes each supported GPU during initialization and creates a slot for each one. The work independently of each other. As far as what your game decides to use, I wouldn't know.

Welcome to the F@H Forum Methoraptor,

In addition to what bruce stated, it is a lot easier if both GPUs in your system are from the same vendor, i.e. AMD or Nvidia. It may require a bit of tweaking which we can help you with when setting up your GPU slots for folding depending on how you want it to be configured.

Games always use the GPU where your display is connected to. So just configure FAH to not use that GPU but the other(s).

Also mixing different vendor AMD and Nvidia is no problem.

But if you have a very old GPU and a very new one from the same vendor then there may be a driver conflict. e.g. the very old GPU would need a deprecated nvidia driver not supporting the very new GPU. And the very new GPU would need the latest driver not supporting the very old GPU anymore. But in most cases that works too.

I ran my old RX480 + new Vega 56 + i7 6700k all folding in parallel, and the PC was still usable for other chores.

No reason a 2nd GPU can't game instead.

My 2 different GPUs had different cooling layouts; their fans were facing each other causing some weird airflow starvation, the heat from both rises in my tower case to heat up the CPU sitting above. It got very hot.

You need a really decent PSU + fans for 2+ GPUs and check your motherboard supports 2 PCI 3.x 16x slots - my old mobo had just one 3.x 16x and the other was 3.x 4x or something - really poor PPD. I ended up upgrading everything - mobo/CPU/case etc, but I've retired the mismatched RX480. It causes some odd heat feedback loop in my system.