Several of us have noticed wild changes in point production from various folding clients over the past month. I would like to use this thread to document our findings to help everyone here maximize their folding production.
Principal Observation: the GPU client (ATI or NV) slows down considerably when SMP is running.
Underlying Problem: the GPU client needs CPU cycles to feed data to the GPUs so that they can stay fully loaded and folding. This is VERY evident on the ATI clients, as they are well known to take up a full CPU core to stay loaded. What is not as well known is that the NV core shows similar issues, especially after the release of Core Version 14 yesterday.
Example: I run two machines with two 9800GX2 video cards and Core i7 CPUs. With the CPUs fully loaded with 4 VM SMP clients (howto here: http://forum.xcpus.com/xtreme-foldin...-your-ppd.html), my GPUs were dropping in production to levels as low as 1800 PPD per GPU core (previously 4-5000).
Solution: Give the GPU core priority for CPU cycles over everything else. We can do this manually through task manager by right-clicking on the core (fahcore_11.exe or fahcore_14.exe) and setting "Priority" to HIGH. The problem with this method is that everytime a work unit is completed, the core closes. When it re-opens with the next work unit, it is again running at default priority (low). To get around this problem we can use a program called PriFinity to monitor the status and keep the Core elevated.
PriFinity Download: PriFinitty 2 by Ed Wilk
Once you have Prifinity running, just select the core and "Add Selected to Favorites". You will have to do this for EACH copy of the core b/c the program maps out the running processes by their directory location, not just file name.
After the cores have been added to the favorites list, right click them and set Priority to HIGH. Then click on "Auto Set".
If you want these settings to be enforced when you boot up, click the Options button and select the appropriate settings.
Screenshot:
You can see from this screenshot that I have a mix of GPU cores running (Core 11 and 14). I also have increased the priority of the master GPU FAH process (folding@home.exe) to Above. This is optional and has minimal effect on point production.
Please post feedback and questions to this thread.






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