Hey Matt,

Thanks for the overage GPU card usage percentages. I've been waiting to upgrade my EVGA 470 since last June but the new cards were delayed and even skipped a generation as you all know. Happy to say that my new EVGA 970 in arriving tomorrow! So amazing to see the difference in crunch times. After 14 years of crunching, I'm looking forward to a fresh card with my new computer.


Hmmm, should I keep the 470 in my computer as a second cruncher? The fan is a bit loud and it does use a lot of power... Feedback would be most welcome...


Get Crunchin'

BDDave

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Hmmm, should I keep the 470 in my computer as a second cruncher? The fan is a bit loud and it does use a lot of power... Feedback would be most welcome...

Since you're from the US you are paying much less for electricity than I am. For me it would be an easy decision not to crunch with a GTX470 anymore, because it's far too inefficient. Sell it to some gamer on a budget, who'll be able to make some good use of it for a few more years.

If your electricity is really cheap there'd still be two arguments against continuing to use the GTX470: eco-conscience and the question whether your case cooling, PSU and ears could take both cards together.

BTW: while Kepler GPUs are also less efficient than Maxwells, I would not yet discourage crunching on them ;)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

The waste is heat, so during the winter the cost is offset by the heat keeping your house warm, but come summer doing some math to estimate the monthly cost might be needed, since you then must also pay to cool your home. I don't crunch during the daytime during summer when my AC is ruuning, but wait until evenings when I open window (meaning the wholes in the walls covered with glass, not the software from Redmond, WA)

ET-Ape,
That was a joke, but not a good one, so don't use it for calibrating your tricorder.

Greg

The waste is heat, so during the winter the cost is offset by the heat keeping your house warm, but come summer doing some math to estimate the monthly cost might be needed, since you then must also pay to cool your home. I don't crunch during the daytime during summer when my AC is running

Ditto here. In Minnesota it's heating season and my house has a computerized heating system :-).

Greg,

Actually the computer IS in the bedroom and this room gets hot in the summer time as a result! The heat from the GPUGRID projects ran my EVGA 470 around 85C degrees on average. I had to run the air condidtioner in the living room, then run another floor fan by the hallway to push that cool air in. My summer electric bill is usually twice as much as the winter bill here in the Los Angeles area.

Also, the new EVGA 970SC is in and running at 73C using 86% GPU usage. That alone is awesome and I hear NO noise with the ACX cooler fan.

Get Crunchin'

BDDave

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BDD,
ET-Ape's suggestion is a good one about passing the card along to somebody that can use it. You could get them to use it for BOINCing in exchange for a free graphics card. Perhaps even include a "dead rat with a string to swing it with".

I'm glad my cluster is in my dining room rather than the bedroom, as I definitely wouldn't get any sleep for its noise. It has 36 of the 80mm fans on the CPUs and GPUs. I've also got three 19 inch box fans to move air through the bookshelf, which holds the 6 open-air motherboards. These box fans do double duty as air filters to prevent dust from clogging up the heat-sinks. On the back of each 19 inch box fans, I put a 20 inch square air-conditioner filter to trap hair and dust. I've got 3 dogs that produce tons of hair that accumulates no matter how often I vacuum. I've also got long hair and beard, that's not quite ZZ-Top length, but almost. The AC filters cut the air flow a bit through the 19 inch fans, but it's worth it for the dust they trap. The cluster has been running 8 hours a day for the past 5 months, and when I had to replace a CPU fan that failed recently, the heat sink had trapped very little dust when I blew it out with compressed air.

It was 20 degrees Fahrenheit here in Knoxville, TN last night. My central heating thermostat is set at 60 degrees, but the house is kept 70 to 75 degrees by my AMD Opteron heating system that's crunching about 500,000 credits per day.

(ET-Ape - Humor warning) I wonder what it would cost to replace the heat sinks and fans with waterblocks to use the cluster as a water heater? Why do some some people call them "hot water heaters"? They heat cold water as there would be no reason to heat water if it were already hot.

Greg

Per this plan, SM1.3 support is dropped from today. No new work to pre-Fermi GPUs. Comments please on the main News thread about the change.

Matt