Argh, I damaged the third card. In all the handling I lightly scratched the back of the card and knocked off a tiny little resistor or capacitor (it's so small I can't tell which it is).

I'll ship it in for an RMA, but the 6 GPU test will have to wait.

jaf

Oh dear, may it rest in peace *taking hat off*

Regarding the problem: I think this should be reported to nVidia, as it really looks like their newer drivers for Vista(+) broke something. Or maybe it's by design and BOINC has to adopt to it, but then we'd have to know about this.

Further supporting this theory is this thread, where the OP uses Vista and was crunching along happily on both GPUs of his 9800GX2 with driver 180.48 until he installed 181.20. Since then he can not get BOINC to detect both devices any more.

MrS

---

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Rom, should swing by in the morning, but if he does not I will pop him a reminder e-mail that we may have isolated the issue and ask him to look here ... but probably won't have too ... he good guy ... :)

Sadly we had the one death in the family ...

But, you cannot make eggs without hatching a few omelets ... or something like that ...

---

All four GPU's have been cranking along merrily overnight. Worst core temp is 81'C, which is hot for sure but I can tell from the sound that the fans are not at 100% yet.

I now have a very good test bed to help isolate and debug this problem and more when my third card is swapped out. If you guys would like me to help in some way just let me know. I have driver 181.20 working swimmingly on four GPU's in Windows XP Pro x32, and on the same machine a different partition that fails in Windows Vista x64.

Interestingly I did a clean install of Windows 7 Beta x64 the other night and installed the 64-bit 181.20 WHQL driver and Windows 7 behaved exactly the same as my Vista intsall. This leads me to believe that a clean install of Vista x64 would not resolve the problem.

My current hypothesis is an x64-specific problem in CUDA with detecting second GPU's in multi-GPU slot cards.

jaf

My current hypothesis is an x64-specific problem in CUDA with detecting second GPU's in multi-GPU slot cards.

Yea! We think the same ...

Never did like tham thar 64-bit wangdoodles ...

---

A couple of days ago I sent in a support request to EVGA. At the time I was thinking that perhaps the BIOS in the EVGA cards was at fault. Here's my original message:

I purchased three EVGA GTX295 Plus cards for the purposes of gaming and running Folding@Home's GPU client. While the cards work perfectly well for gaming, I'm finding it impossible to get the F@H client to run on the second GPU of the cards despite a tremendous effort debugging the problem (found here: viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7874). Others seem to be having similar difficulties with the EVGA boards, but there's at least one guy with XFX boards that is having no problems. The most noticable difference is the slight overclock of the EVGA boards and the fact that the XFX BIOS numbers end in .72 and .73 while my EVGA cards end in .90 and .92. Some detail can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7936.

I realize that this is a very esoteric issue, but is there a possibility that I can be notified somehow when EVGA updates the GTX295 Plus's BIOS? Thanks for any help you guys can offer and thanks for really great products and service.


Here is their response:

I’ve received an update from my PM team regarding folding at home:

- NVIDIA is aware of the issue and is working on it.
- XFX will suffer this problem as well, it is a driver bug.

Once nvidia notifies us of an update will make sure our folding team is informed immediately. Unfortunately we do not have a ETA either on such drivers.