Donate never ending jobs

[EmSti]

Congrats on taking over top dog in Donate ... anytime you outproduce stoneageman you are doing well !!

Not there yet. And if I do get to my goal of being close to 5 Mill, he will probably improve as well. Don't care to chase him or anyone really, just want to ring what I can out of what I got. I am sure you know that urge well.

Last night was a set back. The boinc client aborted on both AMDs, Intel is just fine. One aborted shortly after I last looked at it at 1:30 am and the other 7 a.m. So I lost a good 10 hours, 5 mill may not be any time soon. Why is it always the AMDs that crap out? You would think the graphics driver would work better on them.

[EmSti]

I'm loving the read on this EmSti.
Would you mind starting another thread with your progress? You have lots of good info here on the 7970 cards for this project. (BTW, you are making me itch for an new card) We have a few members that may be getting ready to jump at a few 7970's and would love to keep this info and your experiences handy.

Once I get it down, I will try to remember and to do that. Not much point yet, because there is a post on the Donate form that a new application is on the way that is suppose to fix some of the issues. No date the last I looked.

[DrPop]

My guess would be the combined Catalyst driver. AMD uses it for both the GPUs and the CPU chipset on the mobo. So when the GPU crashes, I'm betting it takes down all of Catalyst with it.
Of course the Intel rigs do not have this issue; they are using entirely different driver for the chipset...

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

[Slicker]

All 4 of mine have the 3 10" fans. But if you take a look at the side and top there are mounting holes for 120mm fans. The review said they had dropped the temp big time by changing the 10" side fan to 4 120mm. I'll have to see if I can find that article.

With fans, bigger isn't better, just quieter. In order for a small fan to blow 65 cfm of air it has to spin really fast. (My 24 core 1U webserver sounds like a freaking jet engine with 8 x 25mm fans. I think they spind around 8000 RMS at full throttle. By comparison, the larger fan can spin its bigger blades at 1500 RPMS and move the same amount of air. Most fans, regardless of their size, move about 45-65 cfm. So, replacing the one 250mm with four 120mm fans should increase the airflow considerable as that's like going from only 1 case fan to 4.

When buying a fan, the goal should be the most air movement with the fewest decibels. If you keep your computers in your crawl space and don't have to listen to the fans whirring, then focus only on cfm.

LEDs look cool, but remember, it needs to BE cool, not just look cool. Your GPU and CPU want more air, not a dazzling light show. It's like a good paint job on a NHRA dragster. Oohs and aahs on the paint job won't pay the bills. It's the time on the clock, or lack thereof, that counts.

Consider the layout of your case and the placement of the fans. Pulling cool air into the case at the bottom and pushing out hot air near the top may give better results than just sucking in air with all fans and hoping that the PSU fan will handle pushing out all the hot air.

[EmSti]

Boy is my face red....Bad version of MSI afterburner, newer version understands 7970 better.

I have been reading up on the Asic quality and what it means, will post more later. But in that reading I came across MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 beta thread and their work on getting Afterburner to managed 7970.

More speed here I come.

[EmSti]

What follows is a piecing together on Unwinder posts on MSI AfterBurner 2.2.0 Beta thread :

A few interesting observations on Thaiti GPUs. First, it looks like similar to Fermi, Thaiti GPUs are binned and there are 4 types of Tahiti GPUs with different ASIC leakage level. So depending on it there are 4 possible default 3D voltages: 1.17500V, 1.11250V, 1.05000V and 1.02500V.
Currently all voltage control tools use hardcoded default voltage (1.175V) for 7970, so pressing "Reset"/"Defaults" buttons in any voltage control tool will put any GPU to 1.175V regardless of leakage level.

As far as I can understand BIOS code, this value is ASIC leakage level fused during ASIC binning and manufacturing. An ideal GPU with no leakage current is 00003ff0, lower values indicate higher leakage and higher default voltage.

AMD uses the following table to select VID depending on ASIC quality:

up to 2F90 (up to 75% quality) - 1.1750V
up to 34D0 (up to 80% quality) - 1.1125V
up to 3820 (up to 85% quality) - 1.0500V
up to 3A90 (up to 90% quality) - 1.0250V


You shouldn't create a hysteria around this value, quality is way too artifical name for that to say that card is bad or good. Take it as an indicator of default voltage, nothing more, nothing less, it doesn't matter what "quality" is if you're running at stock clocks. Lower voltage (high leakage) chips are better overclockers because of more room for voltage tweaking but they eat more power comparing to higher voltage chips when running at the same voltage.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alexey Nicolaychuk aka Unwinder, RivaTuner creator

[DrPop]

That is very interesting, thanks. Definitely good info for the max O/C!

[Mike029]

Thank you EmSti. Good stuff there.

[Fire$torm]

Boy is my face red....Bad version of MSI afterburner, newer version understands 7970 better.

No need for AB Beta ---> http://www.setiusa.us/showthread.php...ll=1#post39709

[EmSti]

No need for AB Beta ---> http://www.setiusa.us/showthread.php...ll=1#post39709

Right, beta discussion thread, but I went and downloaded the latest release 2.2.1 which was released a week or so ago. The beta thread made me understand the errors of my ways.

It's working well so far. The cards with low asic quality (those with high default voltage 1175) I left at stock voltage. Those with high asic I upped the voltage a little but not to 1175, tweaking a bit here and there for heat and stability. I told Afterburner not to syncronize the settings. Now all 5 cards are running at 1125 core clock. It been 4 hours so far and only one computation error when I was messing around on my office PC (i.e. my fault not the setup). No crashes or boinc restarts (knock on wood). But the test always seems to be getting through the night and the first 24 hrs.

For those that are counting, at 1125 and the app_info setup being use (see earlier in the thread) each 7970 is producing 2 Donate WUs every 18:05. That about 30 secs faster that I was getting at 1090 (yesterday's stable speed). No idea what it does at reference speed of 925.