Anyone on the CUDA Einstein Beta?

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jockmacmad2
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#1 Anyone on the CUDA Einstein Beta?

Post by jockmacmad2 »

I have just set my260 off and it seems okay so far. Going to see where the points go :)
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johnn

#2 looking that way

Post by johnn »

Hi,
:shock: Thanks for the potential plug. I'm lookin' at gettin' a dual pcix MOBO 2.0 and 1.0, wonderin' about SLI set-up, must one have a "SLI MOBO" to run sli. From what I gather one must buy this to get the Nvidia bridge. Wonderin' if people are running sli with aftermarket bridge and like I mentioned PCIx 2.0 & 1.0 slots? I have heard sli isn't all it's cracked up to be.
airculpret07 :whdat:
jockmacmad2
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#3

Post by jockmacmad2 »

I'm not 100% sure I get your meaning but let me give it my shot and you can point out where I got it wrong.

I presume your refering to a motherboard with 2 PCI-E x16 slots (slot size) that take graphics cards (even though if your running 2 cards in x16 slots most motherboards run them at 8x times each as they only support a total of x16 bandwidth but thats another story). You can plug 2 SLi capable cards into a MB that does not support SLi and use them on BOINC etc. or to run multiple monitors. However, if you want to combine the 2 physical cards cards into 1 logical card for gaming then you will need an SLi enabled motherboard which will supply the bridge between the cards but also hardware support for SLi. Exactly the same goes for ATI but the motherboard needs Crossfire support. A few boards support both SLi and Crossfire.

As to not all its cracked up to be it depends on the games. Some support SLi and Crossfire better than others. Some games will give you up to 180% of one card with two cards installed and enabled as one i.e. an 80% increase over one or a 20% reduction over 2 depending if your glass is half full or half empty :)

Also if your running 2 cards on a non-SLi motherboard you still need to ensure it has 2 x16 PCI-E slotes as that is the connector size on the graphics cards themselves.

Now PCI-X slots do exist but they are usually on server based machines and I have never seen one on a desktop motherboard as yet, hence why I just mentioned all the PCI-E stuff rather than PCI-X.
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johnn

#4 reply

Post by johnn »

Thanks jock, :wink:
As the referal for ATI crossfire and Nvidia SlI both may be the way I go. By Pci-x I ment to say Pci-express.
I should have said Pci-express x-16 and Pci-express x8 instead of 2.0 and 1.0. This is the board "GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard" I'm pretty sure this comes with no SLI or ATI bridge.
For the sake of saving time, allbeit this pehaps isn't even really
the right fourm for this question. My hardware interests are strictly for
Boinc. So "most" x16 dual card set-ups run at x8. Thanks for clearing that up. Will Einstein Beta run in SLI mode? I think the answer is yes. Just wondering what the advantage is with either set-up x8 or x16. Double the credit output...perhaps or maybe two optimized processes, I don't know.

Thanks again,
johnn
jockmacmad2
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#5

Post by jockmacmad2 »

I use the Biostar boards TA790GX 128 which support ATI Crossfire and come with graphics on-board (which I turn off and put 2 ATI cards in instead). No use for SLi but I do have one of them running an ATI 4770 and an nVidia under Windows 7 and this is the machine with the GTX-260 in that is running Einstein Beta. Biostar don't have the greatest reputation but my 790GXs and I have an X58 i7 board have all been super for me. I guess either I have been lucky or it's their cheaper boards that are garbage and I have avoided those :)

EDIT: the Gigabyte you mention is CrossfireX as well. As the boards use the AMD 790 chipset they support Corssfire not SLi.

So the 790GX boards can run 2 nVidia cards for BOINC but you cannot use SLi for gaming.

Now you used to have to turn SLi off for using BOINC as when SLi was enabled BOINC saw only 1 GPU not 2. This GPU alas was not twice the speed of 1. So in fact for crunching you had to turn SLi off for 2 cards to be used. This changed sometime during the 19x.xx set of drivers and BOINC can see each GPU even with SLi enabled.

For crunching 2 cards at x8 will be fine I doubt there is anyway they will blow the x8 bandwidth as the data is pushed to the cards then processed. I don't believe they are streaming huge amounts of data for long periods so 1 card at x16 vs. 2 cards at x8 will still mean 2 cards at x8 will be double the output of one at x16.
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#6

Post by Megacruncher »

Okay I've got a GTX 260 on this. 13 WU downloaded & the first one 10 min & 2.8% done - got to start somewhere :lol:

Any updates on stability & credit?

Even if it's not a Collatz buster this could be just what we need to finally get Einstein off the critical list & free up our CPU cores for WCG, Rosetta or CPDN.
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#7

Post by aardvark »

Have a look at Wikipedia for a good explanation of SLI.

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface"

This explains an issue I had when I started using my two GTX260's in SLI mode. I have a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard. Initially I had assumed that I would have full use of the SLI using the chip on the motherboard to transfer data between the two SLI slots. After a bit of reading I discovered that the reduced bandwidth through the chip on the motherboard was having a detramental effect on graphics performance. So I plugged in the bridging piece between the two cards, and all was well. Strangely enough I've found that Collatz does not like running with SLI enabled, using latest BOINC manager, whereas GPUGrid ran fine. But it is a simple matter to change the setting in the NVIDIA control panel. So switching SLI on for games is not an issue, nor is switching it off to run Collatz.
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#8

Post by Megacruncher »

Don't Run CUDA Einstein Until You Have Read This.
Check out this thread and in particular the answers to my question.
Basically the Einstein CUDA app only makes sense if you are an Einstein only cruncher with an NVidia graphics card going to waste.
If you have a portfolio of Boinc projects then this app doesn't make sense as:
1: It requires a CPU core as well as a GPU.
2. It doesn't make very good use of the GPU only using it for maybe 5% of the time but tying it up for 100% of the time.
So your Einstein RAC would rise marginally (maybe 20% on a Quad core system) but you would forfeit the option of running much more lucrative GPU projects, such as all of them.
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jockmacmad2
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#9

Post by jockmacmad2 »

Serves me right for starting it and going to bed. Every time I look the units are done and none running lol.
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#10

Post by Megacruncher »

If you want to able to run Einstein without it hijacking your GPU all you need to do is to go to your E@H account page and edit the E@H preferences.
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