- Joined
- 2 Aug 2005
- Posts
- 8,721
- Location
- Cleveland, Ohio, USA
On a whim I picked up a second hand X1950 Pro from a friend who upgraded to an 8800 GT. I took it home and threw it in my HTPC to see if it could do a better job at accelerating H.264 video and the like than the onboard nVidia 6150 graphics chipset. It then occurred to me that I could be using it for FAH. I threw Windows on it and had a go.
Test Setup:
AMD X2 3800+ "Energy Efficient" 35 W
Asus M2NPV-VM
1 x 1 GiB generic PC2-4200
250 W mATX PSU, 14 A on 12 V rail
HIS X1950 Pro 256 MiB GDDR3 PCI-e 16x
GPU client 6.00 beta 1/Linux SMP client 6.00 beta 1
Catalyst 7.11 drivers (latest off of ATi's site)
This rig usually runs Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 LTS for x86-64. It gets a hair less than 900 PPD so that's the number to beat.
My testing revealed that with a fresh install of XP Pro it gets about 550 PPD on 2D clocks. I forgot about the whole 2D/3D clocks thing until it was 50% done with the WU. ATiTool made it crash, as the release notes promised, so I installed the abortion that is CCC and raised the clocks to their 3D-levels. I then got 630 PPD. That's not too shabby, but I'll be going back to Linux SMP since I get a third more PPD and it uses two thirds less power.
I would love to continue crunching with it but SMP gives me better points and I'm just a big old points whore. They really need to revamp the GPU work unit points. They say it does about 40x the amount of work as a single CPU client in the same time period. I'll pull a number out of my ass and say that the SMP client gives 4x the performance of a single CPU client. If they doubled the points for the GPU work units they'd be getting a net gain of 10 times the work done by me in the same time period. I'd get better PPD and they'd get more work done.
But alas, they probably won't change anything until they rework the GPU FAH system. I suspect that they're working on a more generic GPU FAH solution and they won't fiddle with the current iteration much any more The new one will probably try to be more hardware/driver agnostic since the current only works with X1k cards and even then it only works well with X19xx cards. It's already a generation behind the cutting edge.
Is there anything I could be doing to get better performance out of it? It's always run a little hot, even when my friend owned it, so I cranked the fan to 100% for the time being and pointed a Yate Loon D12SL-12 at it. It runs at 58 degrees on 3D clocks which doesn't seem too bad.
Test Setup:
AMD X2 3800+ "Energy Efficient" 35 W
Asus M2NPV-VM
1 x 1 GiB generic PC2-4200
250 W mATX PSU, 14 A on 12 V rail
HIS X1950 Pro 256 MiB GDDR3 PCI-e 16x
GPU client 6.00 beta 1/Linux SMP client 6.00 beta 1
Catalyst 7.11 drivers (latest off of ATi's site)
This rig usually runs Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 LTS for x86-64. It gets a hair less than 900 PPD so that's the number to beat.
My testing revealed that with a fresh install of XP Pro it gets about 550 PPD on 2D clocks. I forgot about the whole 2D/3D clocks thing until it was 50% done with the WU. ATiTool made it crash, as the release notes promised, so I installed the abortion that is CCC and raised the clocks to their 3D-levels. I then got 630 PPD. That's not too shabby, but I'll be going back to Linux SMP since I get a third more PPD and it uses two thirds less power.
I would love to continue crunching with it but SMP gives me better points and I'm just a big old points whore. They really need to revamp the GPU work unit points. They say it does about 40x the amount of work as a single CPU client in the same time period. I'll pull a number out of my ass and say that the SMP client gives 4x the performance of a single CPU client. If they doubled the points for the GPU work units they'd be getting a net gain of 10 times the work done by me in the same time period. I'd get better PPD and they'd get more work done.
But alas, they probably won't change anything until they rework the GPU FAH system. I suspect that they're working on a more generic GPU FAH solution and they won't fiddle with the current iteration much any more The new one will probably try to be more hardware/driver agnostic since the current only works with X1k cards and even then it only works well with X19xx cards. It's already a generation behind the cutting edge.
Is there anything I could be doing to get better performance out of it? It's always run a little hot, even when my friend owned it, so I cranked the fan to 100% for the time being and pointed a Yate Loon D12SL-12 at it. It runs at 58 degrees on 3D clocks which doesn't seem too bad.
].
