28th of November

Farm status
We had a hot day again this week so the entire farm was off.

Parallella's and Raspberry Pi's currently doing Einstein work.

Intel GPU machines running overnight doing Seti work.

Nvidia GPU machines are off.


Intel-GPU machine upgrades
So far 4 out of 6 machines have been upgraded. Two more are in the shop awaiting CPU's to arrive. I should be picking them up next weekend.

It seems the Intel HD Graphics 530 drivers give invalid results. I've tried the original one supplied, the current release one 15.40.12.4300 and the prior version without any success. There is a beta 15.40.12.4326 which I have yet to try, however the release notes don't make any mention of OpenCL so I doubt it will make any difference.

I mentioned in my last post that I did try Linux Mint on one machine however it was corrupting the video display. Since then I've downloaded the latest BIOS version and updated all four machines. When the other machines come in I may try Debian on them. Linux usually doesn't get updated graphics drivers so it may be that I can't use the GPU if I run Linux on them which is about the only reason why I run Windows.


Further upgrades
The Nvidia GPU part of the farm has a couple of 5th generation 6 core/12 thread machines with dual GTX750Ti's and there are also a couple of i7-3770's with GTX970's that I use for GPUgrid work.

My current thinking is to replace the i7-3770's with the same motherboard that I've been using recently (Asus H170-Pro) with an i5-6600 CPU. This way the CPU is basically there to run the GPU and not much else.