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Tony Morley

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Message 61394 - Posted: 14 Mar 2014, 15:47:55 UTC


Good morning team.

I am currently running the below mentioned system configuration. I have just acquired a third GTX OC 770, however, although I have heaps of room in the case I don't believe I'm going to be able to fit all three cards in SLI on the board. So for starters I will upgrade to a much larger motherboard and then have all the cards in SLI. I have a few important questions, firstly I'm seriously considering the Nvidia Tesla K40, I don't know how I would bank roll it but that's another matter. Could I drop this card into the computer out of SLI and if so will this type of card make a serious dent in my Boinc projects? Would the K40 be the last word in Boinc graphic upgrade? Will I need to do any additional programming to get gpugrid and boinc to work with the K40?

Would I be better off simply putting 5k into another system?

Lastly, I'm open to cost effective ideas to take this build to another level. As an entry level Boinc operator I'm grasping at straws with respect to bumping up this system without building another computer.

I know you all work very hard and I greatly appreciate all your assistance in advance. Best Regards,

Intel i7-4470
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Stojag

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Message 61395 - Posted: 14 Mar 2014, 18:45:21 UTC
Last modified: 14 Mar 2014, 18:49:14 UTC

I'm astonished how much money you are willing to put into your System.

But a K40 card is around 5000$. If you don't need the very special workstation features you can go with the new GTX Titan Black for just 1000$ that has the same performance.
With the leftover 4k you can build another Computer with those specs.

Milky Way Workunits need Double Precicion Calculations. Most Nvidia cards are poor at DP calcs (including yours and mine GTX 770), except for the TITAN cards.

The Titan Card is about 8 to 10 times fast than your GTX770, so you will complete much more WUs
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Tony Morley

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Message 61396 - Posted: 15 Mar 2014, 2:52:29 UTC


Those are some outstandingly useful thoughts. I am currently working on the following projects and as you can see I'm a relatively humble player in the online grid computing game. I greatly appreciate all your assistance in inputting your comments and thoughts and I appreciate your toleration of my level of ongoing ignorance.

With that being said I already have the third GTX 770, so heat management is going to be an issue even given the fact that I have one of the largest cases on the market. It was outstanding to get the feedback on the K40, I just assumed it would be the end all in processing for Boinc, I was obviously incorrect.

So given my current system specs and case dimensions I was thinking to employ a motherboard upgrade to the ASUS P9X79-E WS Motherboard, then drop all three cards into the system.

A final thought, is there any Boinc advantage to running in SLI? Can I run two or three cards in SLI and a forth card out of SLI or two cards in SLI and a third card out of SLI. Lastly can I run two or three 770 GPU's in SLI and a 780 out of SLI?

I think once the mother board is upgraded and the third card is dropped in, that will be about as far as I can take this system without being an expert on the subject.


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MilkyWay@home 4,039,660 4 Mar 2009
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Stojag

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Message 61398 - Posted: 15 Mar 2014, 7:34:36 UTC - in response to Message 61396.  
Last modified: 15 Mar 2014, 7:34:53 UTC

To be honest, i have no experience using SLI and there are no other posts in this forum about using SLI for Milky Way.

A quick google search about BOINC and SLI brought me to this post
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3592

They said it is better to disable SLI when doing SETI work using CUDA
The same might be correct for Milky Way.
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Richard Haselgrove

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Message 61399 - Posted: 15 Mar 2014, 8:23:56 UTC - in response to Message 61398.  

To be honest, i have no experience using SLI and there are no other posts in this forum about using SLI for Milky Way.

A quick google search about BOINC and SLI brought me to this post
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3592

They said it is better to disable SLI when doing SETI work using CUDA
The same might be correct for Milky Way.

That thread is five years old - technology has moved on since then.

Specifically, NVidia have made chances to their drivers and cuda runtime support systems. Unless you are still using a five year old video driver, you will find that the SLI setting is for all practical purposes ignored when running distributed computing applications. SLI is a video technology used for display purposes, not computing purposes.

The only drawback I've found is that with SLI, the speeds of the cards are locked together. If one card encounters a computing problem and goes into protective downclock, then both cards are downclocked until you can reboot: if you disable SLI, one card can be stalled but the other run at full speed.

IMO - if you game, enable SLI, because you'll kick yourself if you forget to turn it on one day before a session. If you don't game, then there's no point in enabling it anyway, so you may as well leave it off.
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Profile mikey
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Message 61400 - Posted: 15 Mar 2014, 11:48:41 UTC - in response to Message 61394.  


Good morning team.

I am currently running the below mentioned system configuration. I have just acquired a third GTX OC 770, however, although I have heaps of room in the case I don't believe I'm going to be able to fit all three cards in SLI on the board. So for starters I will upgrade to a much larger motherboard and then have all the cards in SLI. I have a few important questions, firstly I'm seriously considering the Nvidia Tesla K40, I don't know how I would bank roll it but that's another matter. Could I drop this card into the computer out of SLI and if so will this type of card make a serious dent in my Boinc projects? Would the K40 be the last word in Boinc graphic upgrade? Will I need to do any additional programming to get gpugrid and boinc to work with the K40?

Would I be better off simply putting 5k into another system?

Lastly, I'm open to cost effective ideas to take this build to another level. As an entry level Boinc operator I'm grasping at straws with respect to bumping up this system without building another computer.

I know you all work very hard and I greatly appreciate all your assistance in advance. Best Regards,

Intel i7-4470
Corsair Obsidian 900D
Seasonic XP-1000 Platinum 1000W Power Supply
Sabertooth- Z87 TUF Intel Z87
G-Skill 16GM Ram Kit 1866 Speed
G-Skill 16GM Ram Kit 1866 Speed
Intel 355 SATA3-SSD 240GB
WD Black SATA 1TB 7500 HDD
WD Black SATA 1TB 7500 HDD
Gigabyte GTX OC 770 4GB
Gigabyte GTX OC 770 4GB
Samsung 22x DVD RW
Corsair H60 CPU Cooler
NetGear WND4100 Wireless N900 Dual Band USB Adapter
Windows 8 64


Bumping up the memory speed thru new ram will also make things happen faster inside your pc, but there is always the how much gain for how much cost to consider. I know at PrimeGrid there are some projects that are ram intensive while other are not, perhaps the Admins here can help you with that.

As Richard said IF you do not game then yes any kind of 3rd gpu with dp will make things happen faster for your account, just remember to remove all the sli cables. But if you also game you need to be careful as adding a slower card could slow the whole system down.
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Dunx

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Message 61447 - Posted: 29 Mar 2014, 8:53:08 UTC
Last modified: 29 Mar 2014, 8:55:58 UTC

I would suggest that managing a system with two or more cards is made easier by mixing ATI/AMD with Nvidia GPU's, you can mix and run many projects, but a pair of cards can be set up as an SLI/X-fire pair. Each brand have their strengths on different projects, but I find managing them is easier. IMHO

( P6T7 WS + HD7900 + HD5800 + GTX 480 currently adding water cooling bit-by-bit...)

dunx

P.S. If that is an i7 4770 it has an i-GPU which can be used with the Intel OpenCL SDK - I'm running E@H on mine...
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ExtraTerrestrial Apes
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Message 61450 - Posted: 29 Mar 2014, 11:45:15 UTC - in response to Message 61447.  

P.S. If that is an i7 4770 it has an i-GPU which can be used with the Intel OpenCL SDK - I'm running E@H on mine...

Correct, apart from that you don't need the SDK. Any recent driver will do.

MrS
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