My 4850X2, or 2x 4850 setup, uses Cat 8.12 no probs (the 4850X2 requires Cat 8.12 from Sapphire itself, as ATIs 8.12 on its own doesn't work).

As for a dummy plug:

http://www.overclock.net/overclock-net-folding-home-team/384733-30-second-dummy-plug.html

You need the resistors. Just a DVI <-> VGA plug on its own doesn't do it.

That's not his problem GG - just that MW is crunching on one card only, not that BOINC is not getting enough work.

Ben:

Use Cat 8.12

Disable crossfire

Use dummy plug. (or extend the screen and make second screen primary monitor, as detailed here)

GPU-Z should show both as crossfire disabled, and both working 70%+

No special config should be needed for app_info.xml

Also, for the record, GPUs doesn't have an apostrophe, unless you are describing a feature, e.g. the GPU's colour. Same goes with CPUs, DVDs, TVs, PCs. </grammar>

6mb DDR3 Triple Channel RAM

OK -- this is getting rather tedious. I think I will for now approach the problem from the client side by suspending Milkyway processing, and setting it up for 'no new work'.

Assuming we don't encounter a third run of completed workunit kill off, I'll then 'unsuspend' the project to let existing work process and clean the queues.

Then, after a couple of days of normal operations, I'll let new work flow into the workstations for processing.

Gets a bit tedious seeing the exact same post in multiple threads as well. A lot of us are frustrated, but I bet Travis, Dave and the team are more frustrated than us. After all, they ahve more than a few credits at stake!

If someone has thought, the screenshot may be a fake, there is a video of the running app.

I've implemented a solution to the scheduling problem (at least for Windows) that seems to be working on that specific machine. It is able to calculate several WUs at once, but that doesn't raise the throughput of the app, so calculating 4 WUs at the same time on a quadcore isn't faster than one after another. It uses up one core independent on the number of concurrent WUs.
In principle it works like a small scheduler that switches between the WUs 20 times a second (HD4870, 6 times a second on a HD3850). The video shows that GPU-Z is somehow incompatible with this approach as one experiences severe lags or short freezes of the system after it is started.

Thanks Emploi for that video!

@Travis: Have you read my PM about the GPU stuff? What do you think of it?

[..]
It seems pretty cool though and your values should be within our level of tolerance for what we're doing right now. It'd be great if you could post the GPU code in here so other people can look at it as well. I'd be happy to sticky and put a stamp of approval on it after we look at it.

Nice to hear!

And I have not even told you how fast it really is. You will be surprised, I promise!

But there is still the problem that there is no support from the BOINC client for a proper scheduling of GPU tasks on ATI cards (nvidia only in the moment). But maybe one could ask the BOINC devs for that?
But as you are interested, I will go ahead and try to figure out, how it can be run also on current clients.

If there is a real chance it can be distributed as stock GPU app here, I'm definitely willing to share the GPU code. But I have to warn you, it will be a little harder to maintain than a typical C code. Unfortunately, the Stream SDK of ATI isn't that mature and some functionality is basically missing in the moment. So I had to go the hard way and actually implemented it in some kind of GPU assembler language. But as the graphics card only calculates the r loop in calculate_integral (but it is 99+% of the whole computation), one can still change the stuff around it, without the need to do anything with the GPU code.
One may ask why one should take this effort, when CUDA has matured much more already. But the simple answer is performance. ATI beats the crap out of nvidia with double precision calculations. A GTX280 is maybe on the heels of a HD3850, but a HD4870 has about three times the power.

And just as a teaser for the crowd, do you remember the days of the old 1.22 application? A single HD4870 would generate more than two times the throughput of the whole MW project at that times ;)