Quote Originally Posted by Dave gpu View Post
GPUs are a good thing just joking.
Oh, and since I first posted I decided to let two of my machines do GPU work that are capable. I typically don't like these two running GPU work. One is my desktop, it has an on-board nvidia 8100/8200/8300 series. It's old and doesn't crunch very fast, but it's something I guess. When I've crunched with it in the past after a while, Windows started to get wonky. That was some time ago though and now with up-to-date drivers and what not I thought I'd give it a go.

As for the other, it's my main computer; a laptop. It's the gaming-spec laptop and has two GPUs. One is the "on-board" Intel 4600 and the other is a Nvidia GeForce GT 750M with 1GB dedicated memory. This one crunches pretty nicely. Reason I don't typically like to let it crunch is heat, and because I do occasionally game on this system. But lately my gaming habits have been pretty mild so I'm letting it crunch in the background. The system uses the Intel GPU for everything except when you run something graphically intensive via DirectX/OpenGL/etc so it's great it doesn't affect Windows performance or other normal apps at all. I've been keeping an eye on it and it's not generating too much more heat than just the CPU alone, temps are far into the safe range. I've noticed with nvidia inspector it isn't even hitting full load, hanging out at around the 70% area. So, so far so good. If I do need that GPU for other purposes it's simple enough to just suspend it. The Intel GPU is capable of crunching also but I'd rather not. I have let it in the past but I don't want it sucking up more system resources and generating more heat.