27 February 2009

GPU-Z screen shots

GPU-Z screen shots of the 9800GT cards. This 1st one is the old card.



And this is the new card. The only thing I can see that is different is the BIOS version, although the cards look totally different.

25 February 2009

Another 9800GT card

This is the new 9800GT card, somewhat different to the one I bought previously. Its the same brand and model, but I am told that its a 2nd generation one. It certainly runs hotter than the old one (about 7 degrees hotter) despite the larger heatsink/fan. It doesn't appear to be any faster than the old card. It doesn't look anything like the previous one either. I much prefer the older card.




Here is a closer shot, sorry about the glare from the light.



Its now installed in Luke but not without its dramas. Firstly I couldn't get the backplane retaining clip back on. Then while trying to get the clip back on I knocked the recovery switch out (just as well the machine was off).

The driver disc that came with it has updated drivers. It didn't install vtune. So I used the disc from the older one and installed it. BOINC promptly trashed all its cuda work units when I restarted the machine (the older drivers aren't cuda compatible). I then upgraded the drivers to 180.48, which I had downloaded from the nVidia web site a while ago. I have since downloaded even later drivers (182.06) but am yet to install them.

23 February 2009

The next milestone is hitting 3 million credits for Seti. It should take 20 days to do 200k credits. I have no idea how long it will really take as Seti are having bandwidth issues. I have been unable to upload completed tasks for the past couple of days. These things always seem to occur on weekends when there isn't anyone around to fix whatever the problem may be. Also the weather has turned warmer again so I have had to switch machines off.

Highlights of this week
  • Testing BOINC 6.6.10 on two machines
  • Ordered (and received) 2 GTX260+ graphics cards for the KFSN4 replacement
  • Updated optimized Astropulse app released, so installed it on 4 out of 5 machines
I have ordered the i7 machine. This will use the power supply, hard disk and case that the ill-fated KFSN4 was in. The graphics cards mentioned above are also going into it.

I have cancelled the order for the three 9800GT graphics cards seeing as they don't want to arrive. I have ordered (via another supplier) a single 9800GT card to go into Luke.

Seeing as the GTX212 cards are due to be released in 3 months I won't buy any more graphics cards at this point. Once the GTX212 is available I will probably replace the two 9800GT cards as well as upgrading the other quad-core machines with one each.

15 February 2009

4 million credits

This week has been fairly productive now that the weather has cooled down. I hit a couple of milestones. I gave BOINC 6.6.5 a test run earlier in the week. At the end of the week 6.6.7 came out so I gave that a test too.

I have a quote for an i7 motherboard/cpu/ram to replace the KFSN4. I have asked for a cheaper (AMD Phenom II) machine to be quoted on. I should make a decision on this once I get the 2nd quote. The idea is this machine will probably also have a couple of nVidia cards installed, possibly GTX260+ ones.

I am still waiting on the remaining 9800GT cards to arrive. I recall talking to the computer shop at the beginning of February. The conversion went something like this:

Shop: Your 9800GT cards should be arriving on the 9th
Me: Which month?
Shop: February
Me: Which year?

Milestones
I hit 100,000 credits for GPUgrid, which isn't too bad considering I only have one machine with an nVidia 9800GT. The project certificate is below.




And here is the BOINCstats image for the 4 million credits across all projects:



01 February 2009

Not much movement

Not much progress this week, again due to the weather. Its been around 30 degrees each day so the machines have been off during the day. Thank goodness I don't live in Melbourne where its its been in the 40's most of the week!

I have drained the cache on pretty much all of the machines as I can't crunch for more than about 8 hours a day, especially GPUgrid which takes 12 hours a work unit and they have 4 day deadlines.

Seti still seems to be having issues with their multi-beam cuda application but changes are in the works for it. Its still not reliable enough yet. Still no sign of the graphics cards yet, which is a good thing given the heat.

Highlights of the week:
  • BOINC 6.6.3 released. It has some issues with long term debt owed to projects. As a result it wasn't fetching work until it ran out and wasn't maintaining its cache. I had it installed on 3 of the machines. I have gone back to the trusty old 6.2.19.
  • GPUgrid also released their updated science application which uses much less cpu time. It appears to be working fine with run times being slightly longer than before, although this could be attributed to variations in the work units.