I have a pair of EVGA Superclocked 560 TI cards that have 384 cuda cores in them. I already rma'd one of them (too much dust impacted the fan) and the 2nd one is now hitting 85c with the fan at 78% when doing a long gpugrid task.

I'll probably be looking at swapping out the video cards within the next 6 months but I don't know if there's a direct correlation between the cuda core count and how fast a given task gets finished assuming the card clock speeds are the same.

Using GPU-Z, my 384 cuda core cards are being used 88% for gpugrid, 74% for einstein (about 20 minutes), 97% for milkyway (about 7 minutes), and 93% for world community grid (about 10 minutes).

Can anyone share what the EVGA Superclocked GTX 680 with its 1536 cuda cores handles those kinds of tasks?

I think I understand the concept that the performance of the gpu applications is going to vary on how much bandwidth the task needs but I'm hoping that the near 90+ usage percentage could take advantage of more cuda cores.

My 560 is a 1GB while the 680 is a 2GB card. I'm not in a position to swap out the motherboard etc so I'm going to be running in PCI Express 2.0 slots.

Any comments about potentially getting a GTX 690 instead of the pair of 680s would also be appreciated. I did upgrade from an asus mb to a gigabyte assassin but I think the damage was already done to the my video card fans.



Thanks,
William

running crunching tasks, you really have to make sure you keep your cards clean. There are a few tutorials around you should probably look into.

As for what card to upgrade to:
1. do you use the computer for anything else

2. what's your budget

3. power consumption considerations??

The generally accepted back for buck card at the moment is the 660Ti.
Though a stock 660 can get some good numbers too.

Simba123,


Thanks for the response.

I did poke around and didn't see any "tutorials". I've seen number improvements between cards but nothing that stood out cuda counts. You're correct in that I haven't been blowing out the inards on a regular basis.

I'm currently using the computer lightly after hours so it can crunch during the day.

Don't really have a budget but I'm not willing to build a new system since it's about 1.5 years old running an Intel 970 with 24GBs and a 512GB Sata 3 SSD. Water cooled really isn't an option because of the lack of case space. I'm thinking in the 1k range which would either be the pair of 680s or the single 690. But I'm looking for an idea how the jobs respond to the cuda core count.

I'm currently running an 850 psu and have a spare 800 (went thru a debugging issue with an asus board). The system is hooked up an 850 watt ups. I'm currently using about 530 watts which was confirmed with an kill-a-watt plugin meter. The UPS states I have about 6 minutes which is enough for the occasional power flickers we have here during the winter months.

Since I currently have a pair of 560TIs, I'm assuming the 660TI would be an incremental upgrade.



Thanks,
William

Are you using a utility to setup fan profiles? I had the same 560 in the past and was able to manually set the fan at 100% and it never went over 68*C. Maybe try EVGA's precision X, MSI's Afterburner, Zotac's Firestorm. They'll all work with their competitors cards as long as there NVidia.

Are you using a utility to setup fan profiles? I had the same 560 in the past and was able to manually set the fan at 100% and it never went over 68*C. Maybe try EVGA's precision X, MSI's Afterburner, Zotac's Firestorm. They'll all work with their competitors cards as long as there NVidia.

I have two EVGA FTW+ 680 4GB running on this project. They tend to finish the long Nathan units in 5 - 6 hours at around 80% GPU usage and usually running around 60 - 63 degrees with the fan at 60%. The cards run at 1163Mhz and 1176Mhz when on this project.

I don't run Milkyway on my nvidia cards since the ATI HD7950 on my other computer runs through the GPU tasks so much more quickly (8 - 10 minutes on the 680s, 25 - 30 seconds on the 7950). The 680s get through WCG HCC in about 7 minutes. My times for Einstein look about the same as yours.

Just as reference, my EVGA GTX 660Ti SC in Linux (no idea of actual speed, anyone knows?) finish current Nathan units a little below 5 hours, between 17200 and 17900 seconds, most commonly around 17400 sec. They certainly run hot 75-80°C.

Also interested in 650 Ti and turbo models crunching times

Also interested in 650 Ti and turbo models crunching times

Just averaged out my 12 most recent long tasks on my two GTX 680s. Came out with 20599 seconds. How does that compare with everyone else? Of those 12, the shortest was 16781 and the longest was 24861.

Curious how anyone else running with GTX 680s is doing. Anyone getting higher clock speeds (mine are 1163 & 1176 for each card on this project) w/out OCing? If you're OCing, are you able to get this project to run smoothly? I've had no luck there so far using EVGA Precision X.

Anyone have any ideas on how running other projects affects the run-times for this project? My CPU is i7-3770k and I have 7/8 cores enabled in BOINC. Running both GPUs on GPUgrid means I only have 6/8 running other projects (BOINC 7.0.64). I run a number of different projects.

I'm running 2 GTX680's on this computer

http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?hostid=129644

It's 13700 - 13800 per run on NATHAN long, I've got XP Pro x64 on it which is a little faster.

flashawk, I'm using EVGA's Precision X and yes I can crank up the fans but since I'm not OC'ing what EVGA is doing, then I'm assuming the default fan settings should be fine.

Matt, thanks for your May 4th post on your numbers on the 680s. That's what I wanted to know instead of using the theoretical: http://www.hwcompare.com/12368/geforce-gtx-560-ti-vs-geforce-gtx-680/

It sounds like I'm about 2 to 3 hours behind with the long Nathan units since I'm coming in between 8 and 8.5 hours on the 560TIs.

I know this is a different question and maybe should be a different thread but I'll ask anyways. I've seen some references that you might be able to handle 2 different classes of video cards in the same machine? Maybe boinc will pick them up or maybe you need to tweak a config file? Comments?



Thanks,
William

One issue that springs to mind is that I can't control the fan speeds of my MSI 5850 using MSI Afterburner when I have the GTX660Ti in the same system. Last time I had two NVidia's in the same system this wasn't an issue.

I don't know why it doesn't work. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Afterburner. Although it lists the ATI card as being there it doesn't list the ATI's clocks, fan speed or temps. The fan control is also greyed out.
I was thinking of swapping the ATI out and replacing it with a 470 but it's a W7 rig, and I'm not happy about losing 11% performance for one GPU never mind two.

skgiven,


Looking at your "6 May 2013 | 9:06:30 UTC" posting to Matt, your comment

My understanding is that Run Time and CPU time should be identical under optimal conditions for GPU crunching here. If they are not you are running sub-optimally. My times are identical (because I prefer to run using <100% CPU usage). This way the CPU is never saturated and always available to service the GPU. The fact that some of your tasks have a Run Time to CPU Time delta of 25% is key to your problems.

6836895 4430213 106041 6 May 2013 | 8:11:12 UTC 6 May 2013 | 17:00:28 UTC Completed and validated 31,134.25 4,468.79 70,800.00 Long runs (8-12 hours on fastest card) v6.18 (cuda42)
6834899 4420368 106041 5 May 2013 | 18:59:58 UTC 6 May 2013 | 3:56:50 UTC Completed and validated 29,190.20 4,219.95 70,800.00 Long runs (8-12 hours on fastest card) v6.18 (cuda42)
6834834 4428103 106041 5 May 2013 | 18:59:58 UTC 6 May 2013 | 8:10:06 UTC Completed and validated 29,514.90 4,545.73 70,800.00 Long runs (8-12 hours on fastest card) v6.18 (cuda42)

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration - <ncpus>N</ncpus>

I guess where I'm getting confused - sort of - is this is what my boinc manager looks like. I understand the hyperthreading is just cramming more stuff into the same pipe.




Thanks,
William

skgiven et al.

Thanks for the explanations!

William

skgiven, thanks for the advice. I didn't realize this as the tasks report using 0.721 cores each and together the two 680s would only remove 1 of my cores from crunching CPU tasks (I knew the math didn't make sense). I've now lowered my CPU usage. Hopefully this will improve my contributions. Looking into other sources of slowdown as well.

This may be a silly question, but in BOINC preferences, do I need to set the number of processors used to a certain ratio of the total processors? For example, if I set it to 75% of my 8 cores, that will enable 6 cores. If I set it to 62.5% that will enable 5 of 8 cores. If I were to set it to 70%, this would be 5.6 cores. Is this possible? How does this work, or should I stick to percentages that give whole numbers of cores?

Alright, that's what I thought. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. Thank you.