Just thought I'd share my experements with everyone who may be interested in folding.
Since the M1730's can be equiped with a pair of 8700's or 8800's, it is possible to run mutiple folding clients. My first tests under Vista Ultimate x64 with the 177.83 drivers gave some interesting results.
I managed to find a stable overclock of the graphics cards (dual 8800m GTX) of 625 core / 925 memory / 1701 shaders. They can be benched higher but ended up giving EUE's (Early Unit Error). Whilst GPU folding with one card, CPU usage was at 7-11% producing in the region of 4600 PPD. With Vista, you have to attach a monitor to the second card to run dual GPU folding.
"Not a problem" I hear you say, the laptop has a monitor output port. Using the -gpu # command, you can set folding to go onto any particular GPU. Under Vista with an external monitor attached and extended in dual view, the second GPU client shows an error in the log files "MACHINE_UNSTABLE". Alas, that monitor output is on the primary card.
With those overclocks, 1% of the WU completes in about 1 min 32 seconds.
Now having a trial run with XP. XP doesn't need a monitor attached to the secondary graphics card to run a dual GPU folding configuration. There is a draw back to using XP though. The GPU client that one took 7-11% now takes one entire core, but 2 GPU clients still only use one core.
I used the nVidia nTune util version 6.02 to overclock the cards previously. The same method in XP will not allow me to overclock the cards even by 1mhz. The same range of WU's that took 1 min 32 seconds to complete when overclocked now take 1 min 54 seconds to complete, a bit of a slow down but nothing too bad considering you can now run 2 GPU clients.
Hope you find this information useful.
Since the M1730's can be equiped with a pair of 8700's or 8800's, it is possible to run mutiple folding clients. My first tests under Vista Ultimate x64 with the 177.83 drivers gave some interesting results.
I managed to find a stable overclock of the graphics cards (dual 8800m GTX) of 625 core / 925 memory / 1701 shaders. They can be benched higher but ended up giving EUE's (Early Unit Error). Whilst GPU folding with one card, CPU usage was at 7-11% producing in the region of 4600 PPD. With Vista, you have to attach a monitor to the second card to run dual GPU folding.
"Not a problem" I hear you say, the laptop has a monitor output port. Using the -gpu # command, you can set folding to go onto any particular GPU. Under Vista with an external monitor attached and extended in dual view, the second GPU client shows an error in the log files "MACHINE_UNSTABLE". Alas, that monitor output is on the primary card.
With those overclocks, 1% of the WU completes in about 1 min 32 seconds.
Now having a trial run with XP. XP doesn't need a monitor attached to the secondary graphics card to run a dual GPU folding configuration. There is a draw back to using XP though. The GPU client that one took 7-11% now takes one entire core, but 2 GPU clients still only use one core.
I used the nVidia nTune util version 6.02 to overclock the cards previously. The same method in XP will not allow me to overclock the cards even by 1mhz. The same range of WU's that took 1 min 32 seconds to complete when overclocked now take 1 min 54 seconds to complete, a bit of a slow down but nothing too bad considering you can now run 2 GPU clients.
Hope you find this information useful.
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