Folding Forum

HI, I'm new. I tried to google these questions but got no clear answers so as a last resort I registered and started this thread. I got the windows cpu and gpu clients 6.20 up and running and FoHmon going as well. Now I have all of this running and not any idea what anything means. What is a PPD? Is it ok to run two folding systray clients, one for the cpu and one for the gpu, at the same time? I have a 4850 and an e8400 OC'ed to 4.5ghz w/4gb DDR2@ 1000mhz (3.5gb effective in XP), what kind of results should I expect? Why does it say the GPU is actively working but it is showing no temp change? It goes from 18c to 30c at load for 3dmark, but stays at 18c for f@h? Is one of the clients maybe steeping on the other? And is the only way to scale the workload, and control the temps, to under or overclock the cpu/gpu? I would like to keep the OC going but I use some 'special' cooling for heavy loads. I want to run this 24/7 but I dont want to burn up my cpu

Thanks for any help, I am totally shocked I could not just google up the answers but the right string was to hard to find given the overload of information on the web.

Welcome to the forums and the fold!

PPD is points per day, the standard performance benchmark used for F@H. The benchmark machines complete CPU units at 110PPD and GPU units at 1500PPD.

It is OK to run two systray clients at the same time, so long as they have different Machine IDs. To find out (or change) the Machine ID right click the Folding@home icon in the system tray, click configure, and it's at the bottom of the advanced tab.

It depends on the unit, but I would guess that you would average about 250PPD on the C2D, and 2000PPD on the 4850, rising to over 1200PPD and 4000PPD respectively on the fastest units. The GPU figures will change as bigger units are released which utilise more of the GPU (see below for how that also helps to answer another of your questions). To calculate PPD the vast majority of us FahMon, which can be found here.

To check that the GPU is actively working check the log file. (Right click folding@home icon | Status | Log file) If that is progressing then the logical explanation will be one commonly given at the moment: the current GPU units are too small to utilise the 800 SPs on your 4850, so it will not be being fully utilised, therefore reducing the temperature.

GPU usage at this point cannot be controlled, so yes, the only way to control that is to under or overclock. For the CPU go to the advanced configuration panel (Folding@home icon | Configure... | Advanced tab) and adjust the first slider. This can be done for the GPU but will massively slow it down as it does in fact limit the amount of CPU the GPU uses to feed itself, and ideally it needs an entire core to keep going at a useful rate. This is however something of an anomaly as even slower CPU cores will keep the GPU fed at a sufficient rate.

Thanks!

My anti virus locked up everything I had to restart. It looked like F@H was chugging along but I could not get the comp to respond. Speed fan was showing temps and core load flux and the mouse would close windows and alt/tab would cycle through windows... but nothing would respond to a left or right click. I excluded F@H from the AV. I hope the work done was not lost...

AngelEyes wrote:Is one of the clients maybe steeping on the other?

Possibly. While your checking to see if the Machine ID #s are different on the Advanced tab of the Folding@Home Control Panel for your GPU client, tick "Slightly higher" (use if other distributed computing applications are stopping Folding@Home), instead of the default "Lowest possible (recommended)". Only do that for the GPU client.

rgr that, thanks. i had it backwards and had the cpu on slightly higher.

There's a lot of useful information in the WIKI (see link at the head of this page) and it's somewhat more condensed than the forums here. For someone looking for answers to questions that get asked repeatedly, it's reasonably thorough. Some of the examples show v5 rather than v6, but they're generally the answers which did not change so it's still essentially correct.

Feel free to search here or ask here if you don't find what you're looking for, however.

. . . and welcome to the folding forums, AngelEyes