Level1 Techs Folding@Home Team

My guess is the answer is no, but would a slow CPU bottleneck a GPU for F@H? Just wondering how feasible it would be to have a super cheap AMD or Intel CPU driving something like dual nVidia 1050 or 1050Ti's a GTX 1060..

It would certainly be worth testing. I have an old LGA 775 rig. I could pop my GTX 980 in it and see how it does.

2 Likes

My i5-2500 (@ 4.1GHz) always has 1 core at 100% while its GTX770 (100-120K PPD) is folding.
My i7-5930K (@ 4.5GHz) usually has 1 core hovering around the 50% mark while its GTX1070 (600-700K PPD) is folding.

I've never seen F@H assign 2 cores to the same GPU, so my guess is that my i5 is indeed bottlenecking the GPU or very close to doing so.
The only way to find out for sure would be to mate my 1070 with my i5-2500. If that gets less PPD than usual, a weak CPU could indeed be a bottleneck.
I'm doing a big maintenance on both rigs and on my NAS next weekend (main rig has a faulty SSD, NAS' raid card needs to go into secondary rig to flash its firmware). I'll try to think about that experiment then.

1 Like

My GTX770 also doing around the same numbers as yours with an i5-470K. Right now it's showing my daily to avg around 115k. Sometimes I see it around 120k. Combined with the CPU I'm seeing around 130k PPD total.

That GTX 1070 is a beast. I was just comparing the PPD's for the 1050 Ti/1050/1070 cards when I first saw the numbers for it.

My thought is.. I can get a complete C2D E8400 rig for $50 from the local recycling center. IF the motherboard was a standard form factor, I was going to transplant it into my spare case (that's big enough for a GPU), and use my extra PSU. Worst case, I've also thought about just buying the cheapest Kaby Lake Pentium, and cheapest motherboard for it I can find. Cost more up front, but power savings would probably eventually pay off.


They're headless without any keyboards or mice so that's why it took so long

One is the 2x 2680s with a 1050ti
And the other is a phenom ii x4 and a 750. Ti
One has wifi and then I share it's connection though Ethernet directly to the other pc

That seems low for some reason. I would guess the 1050ti should be around 100k. https://hardforum.com/threads/1050-1050-ti-folding.1922855/

Take this for what it's worth.

If my 980 will fit in the case, I'll test it tonight on my lga775. I'm curious how it will change.

Is your 1050ti getting work units? What does it show for PPD while it is working?

Now if there is some throttling going on, it may be on the AMD rig.

I'm at work now, but I'll start playing around with it when I get home.

Estamated PPD is 37180 for the 1050ti
So 37k PPD?
Should I disable hypertheading?

Wow. I had a 1050ti for a few weeks before the fan died. I was seeing 100-120k PPD. Under Windows 10. Can't see those Xeon's being a problem. Maybe a driver issue. I know that the 1050ti would not fold at all under Linux just a couple of months ago, at least for me.

I'll update the drivers, I'll also try and figure out the big advantage flags

I'm not good at that stuff
This is correct right?

Did you request and enter your passkey? If you haven't, do that first. Around 5 succesful WUs later you'll see the number increase by quite a lot.

2 Likes

Pass key?

Open the advanced control, hit the "configure" button near the top left. You'll be presented with this screen.

My 1070 was doing around 100-120K PPD before I entered the passkey. A few WUs after entering it I suddenly saw 600-700K PPD becoming the norm.

2 Likes

Done and done on both machines

I'll do it on my roommates when he's done streaming because I have it folding when he's not using it

4 Likes

Do you know if your 1050 Ti is folding core 21? Earlier drivers it would only fold core 18 if I'm remember correctly.. core 21's would fail.

Yeah it's on 21

Good call. I've heard PPD is much lower without passkey.

I'm not terribly good at it either. I do not have any advanced flags set up on any of my machines.

I still want to test the CPU bottle necking thing. I will use my wife's rig for simplicity. It is a Ivy Bridge, GTX750ti. I'll get a baseline then through the GTX980 in it and start killing cores.

I'm getting 440k PPD with my GTX980 with a skylake I3 on Arch.

Waiting for my Wu to complete to set up for bigadv and to update drivers

So is bigadv not a thing anymore?

The point bonus is no longer a thing. Clients that use the bigadv flag have a chance to get larger WUs

https://folding.stanford.edu/home/big-adv-program-ends-january-31/

1 Like