FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Register Register  Login Login

seti@home (BOINC)

Post Date: 2010-03-04
 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
  Topic Search Topic Search  Topic Options Topic Options
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Topic: seti@home (BOINC)
    Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 2:05am
I'm just wondering about running seti@home on my overclocked  DS rig. The reason for this is the huge amount of heat and power consumption when seti kicks in. Normal power consumption is about 300watts but jumps to nearly 700watts when seti kicks in after machine has been idle for a few minutes.

I am not concerned about the power consumption or cost of that, I'm just concerned if this rig can handle it over the long term without catastrophic failure. Seti uses my CPU (8 cores run at %80) and 4 GPU's (run at %100, no option to reduce). Air out of the back of my 2 nVidia 295GTX's is at 160 degrees F. These cards are built to handle CUDA, but I still wonder at the high temps involved.

Rig is 3 days old, i7920 overclocked to 3.59Ghz, 12Gb Corsair dominator ram,  2 nVidia 295's CUDA enabled (SLI), CPU cooled by Nocturn Air cooler, case is Corsair with all recommended fans.

I can air condition the room as needed so ambient air temp is not an issue. Generally runs about 75 F.

That all said, do I need to worry?

Shutting down Seti isn't an option I want to entertain as I believe in the cause and want this awesome machine to be of help to Seti when I'm not at the Kb.
Back to Top
DST4ME View Drop Down
DS ELITE
DS ELITE

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 36758 		  Quote DST4ME Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 2:33am
what are your temps? give us a screenshot of HWMonitor while seti is has been running for a bit, make sure everything is visible.

didn't you get the warranty? I do folding and I got 5 year warranty just incase but your rig should be just fine.

Nvidia Drivers----AMD Drivers
Back to Top
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 3:36am
I did get the warranty, I just don't want to abuse it. I have found the HWM monitor but will launch it tomorrow as it is very late for me and have to be up for work in a few hours.

Thanks for your quick response. Will be back soon!
Back to Top
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 12:44pm
Here is the output from HWM:
Back to Top
DST4ME View Drop Down
DS ELITE
DS ELITE

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 36758 		  Quote DST4ME Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 6:02pm
ya the 295s run hot specailly when you sandwitch them like that, which why I went LC, lower the temp room to 70c and make sure your gpu fans are set to run at 100%. You may lose a gpu or so because of the fan this way, but that is where the warranty comes in.

once they start going to 90c or higher then you might start to have problems, or you may not, the gpus are set to run at higher temps according to nvidia.

Nvidia Drivers----AMD Drivers
Back to Top
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 at 8:34pm
Thanks DST4ME, I never thought about the fan speed, did a google on it and came up with RivaTuner for messing with the default settings on nVidia cards. Default fan speed was set at 40%, I guess to keep things quiet.

I set the fan speeds at 80% and that helped a lot, though as far as I can tell, the fact that these cards are right next to each other starves the bottom one of adequate air flow regardless of fan speed.

The ultimate solution would be to move the bottom card to the next slot down and replace the 3rd card (used only for two side monitors) with a small form card in the middle so the 295's can get all the air they need.

I am also wondering if putting fans in the top of the machine might help? There are 3 openings for fans already (Corsair Obsidian case) and having them assist in drawing air up through the case might help as well. I noticed when I take the side panel off, all core temps drop about 10c.

One other thing I found was a solution on the BOINC site, a little app called TThrottle, it literally throttles the CPU and GPU cores by user selectable temps. The included graph is output from TThrottle and clearly shows the very differing thermal load on each GPU and the effective throttling of the GPU under the most stress.

Hmmm, seems I'm not allowed to include pics right now, says I have insufficient permission..  Big%20smile  Oh well, you get the idea anyway.
Back to Top
DST4ME View Drop Down
DS ELITE
DS ELITE

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 36758 		  Quote DST4ME Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 05 Mar 2010 at 1:26am
riva is great, the makers made afterburner which is a bit better so you should try it out MSI Afterburner

if you throttle the cpu or gpu then you will lose great performance for the work seti is doing and kinda makes it pointless and it will take much longer for each project to get completed.

the only temps that are warm are the gpu's, so if it bothers you that much, I would just turn up the fans, your temps are fine now, plus you can try adding the 3 fans on top, not sure if it will help too much, but I would not trottle the cpu or gpu.

also for your use I believe your pci lanes don't matter so you can move the 3 card so it has some room.

Edited by DST4ME - 05 Mar 2010 at 1:26am

Nvidia Drivers----AMD Drivers
Back to Top
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 11 Mar 2010 at 3:19am
Ok, I was away these last few days setting up my vids Many Times. Seems a windows update caused a problem with nVidia SLI cards. Roll back you're RealTek network cards to older driver and all starts to magically work again. My cat will take a few days to get over me throwing a Vid card across the room... Anyways...

So, now my thermal problem is under control. Now for the new stuff. Machine locks up randomly and intermittently for a few seconds or minutes, that is, cursor and screen are frozen for about a minute or two when clicking on stuff.

Seti makes this effect a LOT worse, but it remains even after I kill all Seti stuff in the Task Manager. Tried ESET NOD32 to find and kill viruses and nasty email stuff, also tried a rootkit scanner. My system appears to be clean.

It is frustrating having this effect on a Nuke Grade Machine! With or without Seti, I think there must be something that can be set correctly to solve this. I didn't have this problem on my previous machine.

This effect is apparent when playing Crysis as well. Also get very weird effects in the game play, flashing sky, trees in the sky and random flickers and anomalies.

If there is a fix for this, I'm all ears!!
Back to Top
Zain View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie

Email address used to purchase matched with forums account email.

Joined: 04 Mar 2010
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11 		  Quote Zain Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 23 Mar 2010 at 12:18am
Having spent much time figuring this out and having some success with this, I thought I should tell what I know in hopes it might be of use to other members.

The whole problem was related to the video cards and boinc (seti) grabbing control of the display adapters and being very slow at returning control to the user. I simply set local options to suspend computation on the GPUs when user is active. Simply put, hit a key or move the mouse and everything works perfectly.

Additionally, I upgraded the fans which resulted in a 12c drop in CPU and GPU temps. This stopped the Freezez and BSODs. Details are: I replaced the stock case fans (2) with 140mm Noctura fans, and added (3) Noctura 120mm fans to the openings at the top of the case. These fans blow inward and flood the CPU and vid cards with cooler room air. Lots of air. Actually works better than leaving the side panel off.

Additional point: DS has done me a great service building the Perfect Machine! The part they couldn't control was me using my own vid cards. These two EVGA GTX295 Red (dual pcb) cards produce an insane amount of heat, much of which is vented Inside the case, thus the thermal problems loaded onto the CPU (my guess).

Hope this might help anyone running boinc on a DS machine.
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down



This page was generated in 4.296875E-02 seconds.