While testing an HP m9047c (completely stock hardware - never overclocked) for boinc alpha, I upgraded some drivers and somehow 7.0.56 of the boinc client started detecting that it could run OpenCL jobs on the machine which has a "NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS (256MB) driver: 314.07" GPU which had previously gone undetected until a series of driver updates. I was surprised that with so little memory, Seti assigned it 2 "AstroPulse v6 v6.04 (opencl_nvidia_100)" tasks.
Seti machine: 4719778 http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4719778 Fortunately, through just blind good luck, I was on the machine when the huge Seti download finally finished and watched to see how it did. It was working ok in the boinc manager but I decided to see what was happening with GPU-z. It was reaching over 90% GPU utilization and about 48% memory bandwidth utilization. However, after watching the temperature for the GPU chip climb through 107 degrees C, I suspended GPU processing and set the <no_gpus> flag in cc_config.xml. I aborted the running job and the second job aborted with a status of "201 (0xc9) EXIT_MISSING_COPROC". I restarted the boinc client. Old nVidia chips are known in the trade press as having problems at high temps because of a mismatch in the internal expansion properties resulting in breakage. I know this was mentioned for the 65nm and 55nm chips in a 2008 article but I don't know about these chips, which are 80 nm IIRC. You can read some reprints of the bumpgate articles starting at the address below. http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/why-nvidias-chips-are-defective/ If it was me, I'd refuse to let the boinc client recognize these chips as usable GPUs. David Ball _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
