I have been absent to GPUGRID for some time. So I'm not up to date.

Today I installed the newest driver 197.45 on one PC and started crunching WUs. Several times the following behavior occurs. After a few minutes the video output gets lost and I have to shut down the PC. The video card is very, very hot: my impressions are that touching it for a few seconds would probably burn my fingers.

On the other hand, another PC with GTX 295 and old driver 190.38 runs well. I think to have noticed that crunching with 197.45 is much faster than with 190.38.

So, my questions are:
(1) Are these observations correct?
(2) Should I reinstall 190.38 to be able crunching without cooling problems?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

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45 minutes ago I've reinstalled 190.38 and restarted BOINC. All seems to work properly again.

Mmmh . . . it's bothering anyway.
How can the new driver (with CUDA 3000) work better than the old one (with CUDA 2030) on a GTX 295?

Can anyone confirm or reject these observations?

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Dieter,

I am also user of windows-xp-pro + gtx295.
You can also update to nvidia-driver (beta) 257.15, this works OK for all cards.

Good luck,

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Ton (ftpd) Netherlands

How can the new driver (with CUDA 3000) work better than the old one (with CUDA 2030) on a GTX 295?

It cannot work any better.
CUDA3000 is slower than CUDA2030 and only needed for Fermi cards.

Well i'm running 197.45 on all my cards (2 machines have GTX295's). The 2nd generation cards (ie the single PCB) run a lot cooler than the 1st generation. If you are concerned about the temperature grab a copy of GPU-Z to see how hot they actually are.

I was running 196.21 drivers but recently went to 197.45. Both support cuda 3.0. The 257.xx drivers that ftpd refers to support cuda 3.1. Neither version is of any interest (at this point) to a GTX295 as the GPUgrid apps are still compiled using cuda 2.2 for us. GPUgrid has an app for the GTX470/480 users (ie Fermi) which does use cuda 3.0, but you'd have to have a Fermi based card to get it.

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BOINC blog

Well, thanks for all the answers.

Tonight the PC has shut down by itself. So IMHO there seems to be a problem with adequate cooling on this PC.

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Take a lookt at the GPU temperatures. Maybe take the card out and clean it (blow onto fan and exhaust while fixing the fan with a finger). And you may have to increase the fan speed, if the card isn't at maximum already. There are some tool which can do this. RivaTuner is classic for nVidia, although I'm not too fond of its UI.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

I have always been a big Fan of RivaTuner - but we have to accept that its developer ("Unwinder") did not update RivaTuner for month.

The reason for the update delay is the huge amount of time that "Unwinder" have to
spend for the development of the MSI Afterburner (based on Rivatuner).

Unwinder told us in RivaTuner's Forum that he may be able to continue its development in July.

Until then it may be the best idea to use the MSI Afterburner.

Well, thanks for all the answers.

Tonight the PC has shut down by itself. So IMHO there seems to be a problem with adequate cooling on this PC.

I use a GPU/CPU throttling program named eFMer BOINC TThrottle that's very useful for controlling heat & resource use, interfaces with BoincTasks:

BOINC TThrottle Client Temp Control & Monitor

I used nvclock & ran the fan speed 99%, temps dropped 2-5 degrees. Frustrated, I took out the GPU's & cleaned it of dust (there was much more then I thought), temps dropped 10 degrees! If it only dropped slightly I was about to take off the heat sink & replace the thermal compound with Arctic Silver, but cleaning gave a good enough result.

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Dust has indeed been the problem: thanks to Beyond and to ExtraTerrestrialApes.

Limiting to 100°C temperature for the GPU leads to 50% GPU usage on one PC and to far less on the other PC. I took the cards out of both PCs and cleaned them as described.

Now, one of them works well with 92°C at full power but the other card is dead. Its temperature must have been a lot more than the allowed 105°C for some time.

(Okay, I have learned another lesson.)

Bye,
Dieter

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