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Grall
10-Jun-2009, 13:56
i7 920 6GB ASUS Rampage II Gene
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 x2
Vista 64
Cats 9.4 and 9.5

I only run one folding client since the other GPU apparantly is "invisible" unless you disable CF and jump through some hoops with vista (thanks, microsoft. you're so great), but ever since I bought myself dual ATI boards I get early aborts on every damn work unit.

Usually it's non-zero force sum, but I've seen some other error message as well in my log file, not that it really matters. It all boils down to UNSTABLE_MACHINE, and it downloads another WU which also fails, until it takes a break for 24 hours.

I now turned off CF manually just to test-fold for a bit, and i'ts now done over 50% of a WU with no errors so far, when it usually fails within the first 10% with CF turned on. This very same GPU folded great until I slotted in the 2nd board, then this whole nonsense started...

I've seen some forum noise hinting there's known issues folding with ATI boards under vista64, but not been able to find any substantial information on if it's true or not.

Considering ATI goes through the trouble of putting folding shortcuts on my desktop every time I install their drivers I'm surprised this problem even exists in the first place, if it's an ATI problem that is... Sure doesn't seem to be a board/hardware problem tho.

Arnold Beckenbauer
11-Jun-2009, 15:44
Have you played with Environmental Variables? What core are you using?
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=9744

Grall
13-Jun-2009, 12:12
No playing with anything. I just use it straight out of the box, can't be arsed doing anything else tbh. From what I read the variables only affect performance (CPU load mainly) and that's not a problem for me. Got 8 hardware threads to spend and 30GB/s of memory bandwidth, so... :P

Dunno what core. It uses the one appropriate for the WU it downloads for me I presume. Can't check the log either, the damn client keeps overwriting it all the time so anything from more than a day ago typically gets lost...

Arnold Beckenbauer
13-Jun-2009, 18:01
http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=10237#p101181

Sounds bad. Can you run another GPU2 client on the second GPU?

Grall
16-Jun-2009, 00:23
Yeah, I saw that thread some days ago, I ended up turning off crossfire and actually starting 2 separate GPU clients instead since these 4890s are so wicked fast that just one board runs almost any game I have (except the crysises) at over 60fps at 1920*1200 and 8x AA/16xAF...

Now I can't bring myself to actually playing any games on my rig since it'll bring down my folding performance so much, lol!

Currently running 8 CPU clients and 4 GPU clients - 4 on my C2Q Extreme-equipped Dell system and 4 on my i7 920 box. 2 GPU clients on 8800GTXes, 2 on aforementioned ATI cards. Started doing this only yesterday, so I turned in my first batch of CPU WUs for the 6 new CPU clients only minutes/hours ago. Can't check what this did to my score right now. The damn stats server is updating.

This is addictive! I want a slimline PS3 too that I can fold on as well... My launch unit belches tons of heat, as do my PCs of course.