It looks like fall is coming early around these parts, trees are already starting to turn and the beans and corn are drying up. We had a heat advisory last week and highs are supposed to be in the 60s this coming weekend. We had some unseasonably cool weather late in August and that got me thinking about firing up the crunchers again, especially the old Folding rig.
"Old" is an apt description as the parts are old, and it's been offline for so long I forgot what was actually in it. It turns out it was a 2080 Ti and an E3-1276 CPU. I decided a minor upgrade was in order for now, the 2080 Ti is slow and power hungry by today's standards. I also wanted something power efficient so ruled out the high end GPUs. I ended up with a 4060 Ti which met my budget and power sucking requirements.
The first thing I did after the GPU arrived was to install my current favorite Linux distro, Pop! OS. I've mentioned it before, it's my favorite because it already has Nvidia drivers installed and I don't have to mess with that nightmare. It's based on Ubuntu so there's plenty of good support if I run into any problems. Installation was super quick and easy, other than having to get into the BIOS and boot from the USB stick. That took me a couple tries, I'm not as quick on the keyboard as I used to be.
There were quite a few updates so I installed those and had no issues.
Next, I downloaded and installed the new F@H V8 client. Installation went much smoother than I recall in the past, I was up and running in just a few minutes. The biggest issue I had before was the client assumed every resource should be available to it, so it would take every CPU thread and every GPU in multi-GPU systems. You could configure it not to do that, but those settings didn't seem to always be honored and it could be a struggle to regain control of the system. Several times I found myself trying to kill the FAH client from the terminal to I could reconfigure the client not to hog resources. Thankfully all that seems to be a thing of the past with the V8 client. There's a simple slider system that controls both CPU and GPU.
This is a much better solution than before, it's simpler and seems to work great!
Next I installed a few utilities including nvtop (for monitoring Nvidia GPUs) and maybe my new favorite, bashtop. I up and running in probably an hour, most of that time was installing system updates.
The system has been online for about 3 days now and I'm reasonably pleased with the results. First, the 4060 Ti outperforms the 2080 Ti it replaced while using much less power; an obvious win! The 4060 Ti is rated for 165 watts, I didn't want it consuming that much as I want to run this rig 24/7 365 and the CPU etc. is not efficient. I set a hard clock limit at 2400, that keeps the power around 100 watts (some tasks push it over 100 and others run in the 80+ range). I can probably do some tinkering to see where the sweet spot is and I may try setting a power limit instead of a clock limit. Clock limits seemed to work better in the past. I may increase clocks later in the fall when I can shut the dehumidifiers off, that will be a huge power savings. Based on numbers here I am definitely CPU bound although the clock limit is obviously playing a role.
Longer term I am probably going to finally upgrade the CPU as I'm almost certainly CPU limited. I want to let this run a few weeks and get a baseline for comparison versus a new setup.
Enjoy this photo of my "new" folding rig!
This is basically how it's been for the last 4 years. I just ordered a case for it but I may just wait until I have new parts. This open air setup definitely helps with the cooling.
If you'd like to join us our team ID number is 236370.
Thanks to team mate PowerFactor for keeping the engines running during my hiatus!
"Old" is an apt description as the parts are old, and it's been offline for so long I forgot what was actually in it. It turns out it was a 2080 Ti and an E3-1276 CPU. I decided a minor upgrade was in order for now, the 2080 Ti is slow and power hungry by today's standards. I also wanted something power efficient so ruled out the high end GPUs. I ended up with a 4060 Ti which met my budget and power sucking requirements.
The first thing I did after the GPU arrived was to install my current favorite Linux distro, Pop! OS. I've mentioned it before, it's my favorite because it already has Nvidia drivers installed and I don't have to mess with that nightmare. It's based on Ubuntu so there's plenty of good support if I run into any problems. Installation was super quick and easy, other than having to get into the BIOS and boot from the USB stick. That took me a couple tries, I'm not as quick on the keyboard as I used to be.
There were quite a few updates so I installed those and had no issues.Next, I downloaded and installed the new F@H V8 client. Installation went much smoother than I recall in the past, I was up and running in just a few minutes. The biggest issue I had before was the client assumed every resource should be available to it, so it would take every CPU thread and every GPU in multi-GPU systems. You could configure it not to do that, but those settings didn't seem to always be honored and it could be a struggle to regain control of the system. Several times I found myself trying to kill the FAH client from the terminal to I could reconfigure the client not to hog resources. Thankfully all that seems to be a thing of the past with the V8 client. There's a simple slider system that controls both CPU and GPU.
This is a much better solution than before, it's simpler and seems to work great!
Next I installed a few utilities including nvtop (for monitoring Nvidia GPUs) and maybe my new favorite, bashtop. I up and running in probably an hour, most of that time was installing system updates.
The system has been online for about 3 days now and I'm reasonably pleased with the results. First, the 4060 Ti outperforms the 2080 Ti it replaced while using much less power; an obvious win! The 4060 Ti is rated for 165 watts, I didn't want it consuming that much as I want to run this rig 24/7 365 and the CPU etc. is not efficient. I set a hard clock limit at 2400, that keeps the power around 100 watts (some tasks push it over 100 and others run in the 80+ range). I can probably do some tinkering to see where the sweet spot is and I may try setting a power limit instead of a clock limit. Clock limits seemed to work better in the past. I may increase clocks later in the fall when I can shut the dehumidifiers off, that will be a huge power savings. Based on numbers here I am definitely CPU bound although the clock limit is obviously playing a role.
Longer term I am probably going to finally upgrade the CPU as I'm almost certainly CPU limited. I want to let this run a few weeks and get a baseline for comparison versus a new setup.
Enjoy this photo of my "new" folding rig!
This is basically how it's been for the last 4 years. I just ordered a case for it but I may just wait until I have new parts. This open air setup definitely helps with the cooling.
If you'd like to join us our team ID number is 236370.
Thanks to team mate PowerFactor for keeping the engines running during my hiatus!
