Three months ago I gave my daughter a spare ASUS GTX 660, having persuaded her that it was a good idea that her PC crunch for GPUGrid. She powers off her PC at bedtime but during waking hours it crunches. She has a Dell 9100 dual-core that runs at 3.40 GHz and does little more than email and FB. I removed from the stats below those WUs she ran that did not earn a bonus.

My PNY GTX 660 crunches 24/7 on my eight-core AMD 8350 that runs at 4.00 GHz, a bonus every time!

Daughter’s ASUS averages 9753 credits per hour. My PNY averages 11510 credits per hour, an 18% improvement.

Is there anything to do to improve daughter’s performance, or does this look about right?

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It's a ~18% difference. If she's using her computer normally while crunching (browser working with flash ads, FB constantly modifying the browser's view, even a video now and then), then it's only logical that it should crunch slower than your (I guess) solely-used-for-crunching card.

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...then it's only logical that it should crunch slower than your (I guess) solely-used-for-crunching card.

Wrong guess! My GTX 660 is connected to video and I use my PC much more than daughter does!

Leaving the unreported GPU frequencies aside and just looking at the system specs (CPU, RAM, Bus) there is a big difference:

You are comparing an "AMD 8350" to a "Dell 9100 dual-core that runs at 3.40 GHz".
The AMD 8350 CPU is much more powerful and uses DDR3, while the Pentium is less powerful and uses DDR2.

As some of the ACEMD apps code is run on the CPU, performance depends on the PCIE bandwidth, the CPU, RAM and system bus, and that's assuming the Pent system is well configured (isn't running out of system RAM, drive space, or saturating the CPU).

Last time I compared an old DDR2 system to an i7 system the difference was around 20% for crunching here on a GPU.

- corrected for CPU's, and if it's a skt478 model the system memory would be DDR400!

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Three months ago I gave my daughter a spare ASUS GTX 660, having persuaded her that it was a good idea that her PC crunch for GPUGrid. She powers off her PC at bedtime but during waking hours it crunches. She has a Dell 9100 dual-core that runs at 3.40 GHz and does little more than email and FB.

I assume that you are referring to this host.
It says that it has a Pentium 4 CPU 3.40GHz, which I think has only one core hyperthreaded. You should check it with the CPU-Z utility.

I removed from the stats below those WUs she ran that did not earn a bonus.

My PNY GTX 660 crunches 24/7 on my eight-core AMD 8350 that runs at 4.00 GHz, a bonus every time!

Your CPU is much more advanced than your daughter's P4, as your CPU has integrated memory (DDR3) controller and hypertransport (for the GPU's PCIe3.0 bus), while the P4 is using FSB architecture, accessing the DDR(2) memory and the PCIe (2.0 hopefully) through the north bridge chip. The P4 architecture is hindering the performance of the GPU.

Daughter’s ASUS averages 9753 credits per hour. My PNY averages 11510 credits per hour, an 18% improvement.

Is there anything to do to improve daughter’s performance, or does this look about right?

You can improve the performance of your daughter's GPU only by using more recent CPU to feed it (which has integrated memory and PCIe controller), so you should change the motherboard / CPU / RAM.

If this P4 CPU is really a single core / hyper threaded one, then you should not crunch anything else on it to improve the performance of the GPUgrid app.

You can check the generation and speed of the PCIe bus your GPU is using with the GPU-Z utility.

P4 Generation is PCIe 1.0 , it was the beginning of the new bus ;)

It was not a problem for FERMI cards, but could be for kepler due changes (in the PCIe communication or drivers(?)).

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DSKAG Austria Research Team: http://www.research.dskag.at

Thank you, gentlemen. I had not realized how much the app depends on an adequate mobo and CPU. I guess I'm happy the 9100 is contributing something to the project...