Folding Forum

Hello

I have a folding at home PC with both CPU and GPU folding using a Intel 8700K (6 cores, 12 threads) and a Nvidia 1050 TI.

However, I do not know what is the best number of CPU cores (threads) that i should set for CPU folding without affecting in a negative way the GPU folding while still allowing the CPU to fold as much as possible.

Currently I use CPU set to 10 (in the slot option) to leave a core (2 threads) to handle the GPU folding but I see in the logs that some WU set the number of threads used by the CPU client to 9.

Should I set the CPU to 9 instead or is it better to leave it to 10 and let the client decide when to use 10 (the set value) and when to use 9?

I understand that there are some work units that do not like a specific number of threads.

Another question I have, I know that due to the way the Nvidia GPUs work, they require a core from the processor. However do they require a physical core (2 threads for PCs with Hyper-Threading) or they are OK with just one thread allocated (half a core from a processor with Hyper-Threading) ?

Thank you.

Starting with the last question, one CPU thread is usually sufficient. Some projects may benefit from a full CPU core being available, especially during checkpoints and the associated sanity check run on the CPU. In any case, one thread less than the 12 total you have on that processor leaves 11 CPU threads. Due to decomposition problems, CPU project will not be using 11 anyways as that is a large enough prime number to cause problems.

Some project have decomposition issues with multiples of 5, for them 5 is too large of a prime. But others do not and work well on 10 CPU threads. Based on that, I would suggest leaving the setting at 10. When WUs are available for that thread count you will get them, and the rest of the time the Assignment Servers will fall back to assigning WUs that can process on 9 threads.

Thank you for your help.

I will leave the CPU slot to 10 in this case.

In the future, I may have access to another PC with a 6 core and 12 threads processor, for CPU folding only, it should be ok to set the CPU slot to 12, right?

I mean, there is no need to allocate 2 threads for windows general tasks as the PC would fold 24/7 with none or very little other applications use than folding?

Depending on what the PC is doing in those general tasks, 12 CPU threads should be fine. They may interrupt a CPU folding thread being used for a short time, but overall the throughput of 12 threads should be better than 10.

Thank you.

The worst general tasks (in terms of CPU usage) that windows 10 should do are Windows updates, these should take the most processing power followed by the default integrated Windows 10 virus updates/scans and Windows 10 services.

Foxter wrote:...In the future, I may have access to another PC with a 6 core and 12 threads processor, for CPU folding only, it should be ok to set the CPU slot to 12, right?...

If it's a dedicated system for folding, I would suggest that you look into a Linux/Mint setup. Getting CPU folding up on running on either OS is very easy and currently, Linux has a slight performance advantage over Windows (this may or may not change in future FahCore releases/versions).