Some Friday night tweaking...

ChrissyT88 · 20 Mar 2009 at 21:56

Not sure how many of you will have seen this, but i'll throw it out there for those who haven't...

Basically, there is a leaked nvidia driver that seems to give silly ppd on the new p5900 series WUs. I have downloaded the driver and installed it on an experimental Server 2008 install to test it out, and the points it generates is wwaaayyy higher than that of the 180.60 drivers i was using on Vista.

I have posted in the thread to ask whether the results returned by the lcinets running on this driver would be valid - i dont really see a reason why not, but id rather find out than waste time! Temps seem about the same as a priority adjusted client, although there is a much more frequent (and in my opinion) more annoying buzzing coming from the card.

Im not sure how reliable the drivers are - they are from a source that comes up occasionally in the graphics card section of OCuK - i gave them a quick virus scan and found nothing wrong. Obviously you use these at your own risk - i have no idea how stable they are/if they will cause damage to hardware etc. However, i thought some of you would like to have a play, if only to see your card pull silly ppd!

sir-les-mp · 20 Mar 2009 at 23:56

i will have to give these a try
cant have you catching me up again so quickly

ChrissyT88 · 21 Mar 2009 at 00:01

Hehe - i havent put them on my main PC. I spent too much time trying to tweak Server 2008 and broke the folding client, so whilst those drivers are very fast, i didnt actually submit any work with them. I have read a few reports of them being a little unstable with the other WUs though - i was planning on waiting until either an official beta is released by nvidia, and also to hear back from the FAH/nvidia developers on the quality of the driver. No use in running the simulations if they all have to be done again!

EDIT:

ihaque (Developer of fahcore 14) said:
Bottom line: I don't fully trust the results coming from these drivers, and I do not encourage their use, because of strange timing inconsistencies relative to previous driver revs. Further, because these are unofficial, uncertified, leaked drivers, it's entirely possible (even likely) that they have not been fully tested and verified for correct operation.

Looks like i spoke too soon - thats enough to tell me to hold off for a while!

sir-les-mp · 21 Mar 2009 at 01:20

welli installed them on my system it found my 8800gts no probs and would run that but there were probs with the GX2
i dont know if its to do with two differrent gen nvidia cards or it just dont like vista 32bit and the GX2 in combination.
just installed the latest wqcl released drivers
What a waste of 2 hours

lee87 · 21 Mar 2009 at 09:42

Thanks for the tip, my ppd has increased from 3100 to 4500.

ChrissyT88 · 21 Mar 2009 at 10:40

To reiterate, stanford is discouraging the use of these drivers until they can work out whether or not they are producing sound results. I have removed the link accordingly.

@SIR-les - pity about the wasted time, but trust me the results were awesome!