Is it only me, or is Summer causing a drop in RAC in other people's PC's? Winter was great! I never saved as much money on heating as I did this winter. Now it's Spring & that's not Summer. My open window shut while I was away & it was like a furnace at home, almost all WU's failed due to the heat.

Would there be a smaller chance of WU's failing if they were shorter & if so, would it be a good idea to have short WU's in Winter & long ones in Summer. Or maybe being able to choose between short & long WU's so that people in the South won't get miffed with the people of the North? Also, if there was a choice, smaller GPU owners (or those with bad cooling) can choose the short WU & monster water-cooled GPU owners can choose the long ones.

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I keep a thermostatically controlled exhaust fan in the window of the room with "the grove" year round. The only time it gets taken out of the window and the window closed is when it is below freezing outside over night, something that happens here less than a week a year. I suppose that is less viable for people in more varied climates.

Either way, the grove DOES get trimmed during the summer to keep the room tolerable.

My laptop is also starting to heat up. Too bad that TTrottle isn't recognizing the temp sensor. I need a temp limit option in BOINC...fast.

There are a couple of things you can do:

- increase the GPU fan speed
- lower GPU core and Shader clocks a bit if you get errors
- clean the heatsink / fan (be careful not to damage your card)
- replacing the thermal compound (be more careful not to damage your card)
- add / increase case air flow
- lower the GPU voltage (and clocks accordingly) (mostly only possible via BIOS editing - not for the unexperienced!)

I need a temp limit option in BOINC...fast.

Don't count on that. There are many chips and different ways to read their temperatures out. That's a lot of work, so the only practical way would be to interface with some existing 3rd party tool. Not exactly what BOINC traditionally does ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Would there be a smaller chance of WU's failing if they were shorter

If your failures are due to heat, then no, shorter WUs would not help.

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Thanks - Steve

I need a temp limit option in BOINC...fast.

Don't count on that. There are many chips and different ways to read their temperatures out. That's a lot of work, so the only practical way would be to interface with some existing 3rd party tool. Not exactly what BOINC traditionally does ;)

Try eFMer TTthrotle to limit temps. Also works in conjunction with BoincTasks:

BoincTasks BOINC Client Monitor & Control

BOINC TThrottle Client Temp Control & Monitor

A couple of additional suggestions.

Configure your CPU (that you also crunch with) to run slower.
That will reduce the system heat and in turn the temps of your GPU!

- Start, Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, Power Options,

Alternatively,
Use Less CPU cores :)

EVGA Precision is a simple (and free) tool to reduce/increase your core speeds (GPU core, RAM, Shaders). It also lets you control the fan speed on some cards.

PS. Laptops are best sat on a flat surface, soft chairs and beds are bad!
There are also USB trays/ laptop cooler pads that you can get to sit your laptop on.

I moved a few things around. I've got a casing where the 2 front fans can be mounted differently. I put them both at the bottom, the HDD in the middle, cleaned up the cable mess & made sure my window didn't shut unexpectedly. But even though I got better temps, the problem was the RAM sticks that used a higher frequency, that I remembered to increase in voltage, but I forgot to increase the NB voltage due to the higher frequency of the RAM. Now it looks good! ;-)

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I've got my HD4870 running Milkyway at full throttle since a year now. I mounted an Accelero S1 with 2 x 120 mm fans and initially it ran in the mid 50°C. After clients optimization temperatures increased into the mid 60°C range. During winter I noticed that I had reached mid 70°C, even without major changes to the PC. By now I was at 80°C and had to throttle back 10 MHz - not pleasant. Today I replaced the stock thermal pad (it had become rather solid) with my age old Artic Silver 2. Now I'm back to 73 - 74°C at 23°C ambient, so will likely reach 80°C again during real summer. But an improvement of 6°C is nothing to sneeze at!
EDIT: today I'm down again into the mid-60°C range, at similar room temperature. Very nice! Maybe the AS2 needed some time to reach its full potential.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I've got my HD4870 running Milkyway at full throttle since a year now. I mounted an Accelero S1 with 2 x 120 mm fans and initially it ran in the mid 50°C. After clients optimization temperatures increased into the mid 60°C range. During winter I noticed that I had reached mid 70°C, even without major changes to the PC. By now I was at 80°C and had to throttle back 10 MHz - not pleasant. Today I replaced the stock thermal pad (it had become rather solid) with my age old Artic Silver 2. Now I'm back to 73 - 74°C at 23°C ambient, so will likely reach 80°C again during real summer. But an improvement of 6°C is nothing to sneeze at!

Eight HD 4770 cards currently running MilkyWay, all stock cooling, 6 are 2 cards per machine. Temps are 45C - 61C depending on the case and card placement. All are OCed to 830MHz. GPU utilization is 99%. Unlike my NVidia cards, they just run. Not a problem ever. No crashes, no failed WUs, no problems at all. Same with Collatz except you can subtract about 3-4 degrees temp/card.

I'm starting to wonder if there have been some GTX260(216) unfriendly WU's. I got errors on 2 different PC's today. One running Windows 7, the other running Mint Linux 8. It's not been extra hot today & my windows didn't shut so ambient temps haven't been bad.

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It is not you. The *GA* tasks have been having difficulties. There is a post in the GA thread that we should abort all GA8* and GA9* but they have not been pulled from rotation so they still show up from time to time. I assume the project has decided it is easier to just let them hit the "too many errors" status instead of pulling them manually. I personally have had quite a few failures with GA10* and hope we can get them straightened out or get some official work on if we should abort them or not.

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Thanks - Steve

It is not you. The *GA* tasks have been having difficulties. There is a post in the GA thread that we should abort all GA8* and GA9*... I personally have had quite a few failures with GA10* and hope we can get them straightened out or get some official work on if we should abort them or not.

I've had all failures of GA10 the past week or so (about 3-4 WU's, costing about 15 hours of crunching). No / minimal issues with other WU's, so I'm manually killing GA10's if I see them.