I was out of town this weekend and my system rebooted last night, shortly after midnight, and I don't have my FAH clients set up to run automatically so I've posted 0 points today. I'll post a few points before midnight but my daily average is going to take a major beating.

I will reveal all. Soon. I want to enjoy my top 3 production status for a couple of days before I reveal all of my "secrets."

The clues are all about you in my recent posts.

18,713 points posted yesterday. That more than I did in the last 6 months with my old computer. In hindsight it wasn't worth the electricity I was using.

Yes, Windows 7 64-bit.

Both cards have long since picked up new WUs.

18,713 points posted today. Not a bad day. I was doing 2K a MONTH with my old 2.4 GHz Northwood rig. I post more in 3 hours now than I was doing in a month.

I never did discover a definitive reason why the two cards were folding at different rates. I changed some things and they are folding about equally now. In fact, over the last 10 frames their frame rates are within 4 seconds of each other on a pair of 5903s. Here are a few of the things I did and t...

303 to 403 watts, with most of the readings in the low 300s. The PSU is an Enermax Modu82+ 625W. It's drawing outside air directly, not warm air from inside the case. But the fan speeds are, I believe, based on power draw not on temperature. My PSU fan speed at the moment is varying between 1055 and...

Something is screwy, I just haven't figured out what. I'm getting 5700 PPD from one GPU and 3700 from the other. The FAH configurations are identical. The clocks (shader, core, memory) are the same. The GPU core temperatures are running about the same, with similar fan speeds (within 2%). Both are w...

You say that as if the conclusion to be drawn is intuitively obvious. Two GTS 250s do 10k ppd. Is another 2k to 4k ppd worth an additional 50 watts? That depends. My PSU fan is already running at 1200 RPM. Any higher and it becomes the loudest thing in my system. Maybe my case fans have to spin fast...

It's apparently just a variation between two work units. I stopped both clients and swapped -gpu 0 and 1 in the shortcuts I use to launch them, so that the two cards swapped work units. The PPD remain the same, so it's not the hardware.

The PPD for one WU has varied between 5100 and almost 6000.

OK, someone explain this to me. I have two identical EVGA GTS 250 (9800 GTX+) cards. Each is processing a 5903. One is getting 5500 PPD and the other is getting 4000 PPD. What's up with that? The first is processing a step about every 4:30 while the second is processing a step about every 6:00 minut...

I am now folding with a GTS 250 (aka 9800 GTX+) with a second on the way. $137 with shipping from the egg. It's an eVGA card and the OEM fan is running at only 40% on auto and is not audible in my rig. The PPD are all over the map. 4700 on the current WU. The PPD on my second card, a 64-shader 9600 ...

I'm not quite following you. The dummy plug works for you or it doesn't? BTW, maybe it's obvious to everyone what a "dummy plug" is, but just in case, it's something you plug into a video card to simulate a monitor. Windows Vista, if it finds no monitor connected to a video card at boot, will disabl...

I switched to the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme this morning. My CPU temps are running right at 2 degrees higher with the same Scythe fan, although it could be a degree warmer in my apartment than it was this morning. That 2 degree difference does agree with some of the tests I have seen. As we hav...

I opted for a 512MB version for $130. The 1 GB models are $150, but yeah, at that point why not step up to the 260? However, with the 260, you either run it alone or with another 260. No other card would play well with it because of its 216 stream processors. There's no such thing as a one-slot grap...

I went from 3000 points a month with my old P4 Northwood to 3+ times that PER DAY with the new i7, about a hundred-fold increase.

I was tempted by the GTX 260 but the performance isn't enough greater than the 9800 GTX+ (now GTS 250) to justify the extra cost and size to me. However, if I could only have one card, that's what it would be.

One machine.

Gotcha. I ordered one of the "new" GeForce GTS 250's this morning. It will replace the 112-shader 8800GT. I'll be able to verify for myself whether the 64-shader 9600GT runs faster when paired with a card with exactly twice the number of shaders vs. the current 64/112 mismatch. I say "new" because t...

Why, specifically?

There were a few hoops to jump through but getting a second GPU running wasn't horrible, just maybe not as easy as you'd like. The "dummy plug" requirement had me stumped briefly until I found instructions for making one with (1) no soldering iron and (2) from parts (except for some resistors) I had...

On my new i7 machine, I was getting around 3K PPD running one SMP client. That's as many as I was earning in a MONTH on my old P4 machine so I wasn't dissatisfied. Even so... I'm now running 4 instances of a "folding virtual appliance" using the free VMware Player and look to be getting something no...

I'm folding on the Windows 7 beta. 64-bit.

I don't plan on removing the memory but yes, the fan would have to be removed to get to one bank of memory, and doing that inside the case will be difficult. I've never had to remove a case fan. Compressed air has always been sufficient to clean my fans. But yes, if you DO need to remove that fan, i...

I don't have any benchmarks for you but I'm giving the Mugen 2 two thumbs up. It's cooling an i7 920 running at 3.4 GHz at stock voltage. The fan that comes with the cooler is sweet. It's smooth running and at 1300 RPM will never be heard outside the case. It's a huge heatsink, but fits comfortably ...

This is a good thread on the subject.

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 09&start=0

Here is one good discussion about it, but with no clear conclusions except that mixing cards with different numbers of shaders typically leads to a loss of performance in at least one of the cards vs. running that card alone.

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7797

In my new rig I originally bought a GeForce 9600GT because it's the most powerful card I could find that was passively cooled. At the time I didn't know that FAH could run on a GPU. Now I do and I'm excited about it. A couple of days ago I received an 8800GT I bought on eBay for $85. The purpose of ...

That would be 75W above what they can draw from the PCIe bus. Right?

haysdb wrote:My old Northwood system is doing a whopping 120 PPD. Almost 8 days to do one 905 pt Gromacs.

My new system is, at the moment according to FahMon, doing 10261.62 PPD. That's 85 times more points per day.

I feel so inadequate.