Confusion - Low PPD out of decent machines

Associate
Joined
20 Aug 2007
Posts
1,333
Location
Solihull
Hi all,

Bit confused, I've started folding recently - I have my 2 rigs at home folding - my main rig is the one in my signature, my other rig is as follows.

AMD Phenom II x4 955BE (golden chip <3) @ 4.3ghz - GeForce 630GT 2GB 6GB XMS3 @ 1600mhz

For some reason the second rig actually get's higher PPD than my main rig; for some reason my main rigs cpu is estimated at 5.1k PPD and my radeon 6970 is estimated 2.1PPD - is something drastically wrong? My second (lesser rig) is getting almost double PPD
 
Probably partly to do with use.

If you are using the machine and gfx card in the main rig then the PPD will go right down. Every WU has a deadline and the more you use the machine the closer to the deadline it will get and the closer to the deadline or if you miss the deadline you get a lot less points.

Also make sure you have a passkey setup on both rigs. And also make sure you are comparing the same WU type on each machine.

The only other thing that could be affecting it is also due to type of Work Unit and system use, the AMD card tends to use more CPU on certain types of WU than any Nvidia card, unless yo are crunching the Beta WU's using OpenCL in which case the situation is reversed.

Also make sure you have the slider turned up to "Full" use on both machines.

Perhaps you could copy and paste the log file from the slow machine and some screen shots of the from Advanced settings, specifically the main tab and Configuration slot settings for both the CPU and GPU
 
on my main machine I have it set to idle, so it does nothing when Im using the machine (cause Im normally gaming and it wrecks my fps) but when im idle it goes up to max.

I do also have the passkey setup for both machines on my username, I have the Beta tag on the gpu but it doesn't do anything, my £350 6970 is being outperformed by a £50 630Gt D:

Would a bigadv tag work on my cpu or do I need more cores?
 
my £350 6970 is being outperformed by a £50 630Gt D:

Tell me about it. I've paused GPU folding because my 7850 was getting significantly fewer points than the six-year-old 8800GT which it replaced. Unless you get the new GPU WUs with bonus points, AMD cards' output seems to be pretty bad.
 
ppd1.png


Surely my cpu should do more than this? It's a powerful chip for it's age, especially with the OC on :(
 
bigadv won't work on those CPU's unfortunately. I'd say your lower output on the primary rig would be due to you using it for gaming all the time.

Do you leave them on overnight?

Looking at your stats you had a couple of good days around the 25th of up to 12K PPD for the day. Have you changed anything since then?

But basically I think you are suffering on the X6 rig because you use it so much.

Yes OcUk do sell the sorts of things you could use to increase your PPD.

Probably the fastest way to increase your current PPD would be to replace the 630 with a 560Ti or 660Ti, again depending on WU but you could get between 16-25K PPD just from that card alone. If you stick more than one in there you will probably need to stop crunching on the CPU as it will struggle to provide enough interrupts to the GPU's to keep them fed.

It really depends how much you want to spend. Look in the Clearance section for bargains. Nvidia is the more consistent performer, AMD 79xx gets a great boost from the beta WU's

But at the end of the day we get a variety of WU's and PPD can fluctuate on the same graphics card by up to double what one WU gets to the next.
 
Well my x6 rig crunches all day whilst I'm at work and im only actively on it between 7pm-1am during the week, the x4 rig is now going to be on 24/7.

Only thing I changed is the beta tag on my radeon 6970, I thought that was suppose to improve it :(

Im not sure what I can budget to spend at the moment, I'd rather spend on my main rig to be honest, cause then I could utilize the nice shiny cards for gaming as well - the x4 does seem to perform nicely in that rig mind, also I'd need to upgrade the mobo for an SLI card in the x4 rig, and maybe PSU too, it was a budget build which had a small upgrade.. Hmm :o
 
If you look at that screenshot, you downloaded it 3 days ago. Whereas the 15m:45s frame time its running at now indicates it should only take 26 hours to crunch.

If you plug your frame time and the WU type into the F@H Bouns point calculator we can see that WU if completed in the 26-27 hours or so it should take will get an extra 3K PPD through finishing early for around 8,500 PPD

The AMD card a 6970 is as you say a powerful card, however it wasn't designed for the types of calculations that Folding needs. The 79xx series GPU's are. So get better points. But again it depends on the type of WU.

For a small upgrade just get a better Nvidia card in the other machine, and swap the 69xx in the main rig for an Nvidia 660Ti
 
If you look at that screenshot, you downloaded it 3 days ago. Whereas the 15m:45s frame time its running at now indicates it should only take 26 hours to crunch.

If you plug your frame time and the WU type into the F@H Bouns point calculator we can see that WU if completed in the 26-27 hours or so it should take will get an extra 3K PPD through finishing early for around 8,500 PPD

The AMD card a 6970 is as you say a powerful card, however it wasn't designed for the types of calculations that Folding needs. The 79xx series GPU's are. So get better points. But again it depends on the type of WU.

For a small upgrade just get a better Nvidia card in the other machine, and swap the 69xx in the main rig for an Nvidia 660Ti

Hmm, will a 660TI be an upgrade for games too? :) I gotta keep my gaming interests in mind! :D
 
The only other thing is that you need to complete 10 units on the CPU before you start to get bonus points, and you have to maintain a 80% completion rate before the deadline to keep getting bonus points. And the faster you finish the better bonus points you get.

Lastly the v7 client is a great way of estimating PPD appparently. Something like HFM.NET is a better tool or use the bonus point calclulator I referenced above.
 
Remember that the 17 beta WUs for GPU are on hold atm. They are doing some changing about them. So even the biggest HD7970s are not getting the WUs they wanted badly.

From what I understand Intel chips generally do better (desktop CPUs) because of the amount of floating points. An 8 core FX chip does about as good as an i5. Clock for clock. Biffa was right in saying you should probably just get one decent folding gfx card and only fold with that. It will keeps the bills not insanely high but give you more PPD than you do now.
 
my gtx 460 get 18'000ppd most of the time, some times it will go a little higher depending on the work unit, there is some 336 core gtx460 evga refurbs around for cheap ;)
 
Titan Update

So seeing as there are no beta WU's at the moment, my test Titan@stock is getting the following PPD on the following projects:

7626: 61,500 PPD
7660: 35,000 PPD
8071: 32,500 PPD
 
Back
Top Bottom