Radeon RX 580 GTS Black Edition video card

John Tibbetts
John Tibbetts
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Topic 224741

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival this coming week of my new video card, an AMD Radeon RX 580 GTS Black Edition. It has 8GB GDDR5 VRAM (256-bit), an 8GHz memory clock, and 2,304 stream processors.

 

My current card is an nVidia GTX 1050Ti. Gamma ray pulsar WUs take 22 minutes, and Gravitational wave WUs take 25 minutes, on average, to complete.

 

For those of you who have experience with the 580 series cards, do you like it for use with Einstein@home? I'm guessing this new card will perform a lot better than my current card. I will also be using it for PC gaming.

archae86
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Here at Einstein the 570 and

Here at Einstein the 570 and 580 cards have done very well regarding Einstein productivity vs. purchase price and operating cost.  I think you will find your 580 to out-perform your 1050Ti here by far more than game-oriented benchmarks would suggest.

If you run pure Gamma-Ray pulsar work on it, it won't even need a very wonderful CPU or motherboard to get nearly all it can give.  If you run Gravity work on it, you will be rewarded if your CPU and perhaps your motherboard are rather more capable than needed for good GRP results.

John Tibbetts
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Greger wrote: You move from

I have a 900W power supply installed in the computer, which should easily handle the new graphics card. I'm only running one card, and only have one mechanical hard drive (the rest being SSDs).

John Tibbetts
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archae86 wrote: Here at

archae86 wrote:

Here at Einstein the 570 and 580 cards have done very well regarding Einstein productivity vs. purchase price and operating cost.  I think you will find your 580 to out-perform your 1050Ti here by far more than game-oriented benchmarks would suggest.

If you run pure Gamma-Ray pulsar work on it, it won't even need a very wonderful CPU or motherboard to get nearly all it can give.  If you run Gravity work on it, you will be rewarded if your CPU and perhaps your motherboard are rather more capable than needed for good GRP results.

My motherboard and CPU are from late 2014 (i7-4770 on an Asus Z87 Sabertooth gaming motherboard with 32GB of RAM), but I do plan on upgrading to an AMD Ryzen CPU and motherboard with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, within the next few months. I think I'll just run gamma ray WUs until I upgrade those components, then switch back to also running gravitational wave WUs.

.

Tom M
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John Tibbetts wrote:My

John Tibbetts wrote:
My motherboard and CPU are from late 2014 (i7-4770 on an Asus Z87 Sabertooth gaming motherboard with 32GB of RAM), but I do plan on upgrading to an AMD Ryzen CPU and motherboard with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, within the next few months. I think I'll just run gamma ray WUs until I upgrade those components, then switch back to also running gravitational wave WUs.

Trying to run GR and GW gpu tasks will cause you headaches.

Before you enable your GW GPU tasks make sure you set your daily buffer to something like "0.01" or you may find yourself with outsized amounts of GW tasks GPU tasks due to a variable that doesn't handle wildly varying processing times on the gpu in the Boinc Manager.

I finally reached the point where I can run GR GPU tasks and GW CPU tasks on the same system.  I started at "0.01" until I was certain that I wasn't going to be buried (again) in GW tasks.

Tom M

 

 

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

John Tibbetts
John Tibbetts
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Tom M wrote: John Tibbetts

Tom M wrote:

John Tibbetts wrote:
My motherboard and CPU are from late 2014 (i7-4770 on an Asus Z87 Sabertooth gaming motherboard with 32GB of RAM), but I do plan on upgrading to an AMD Ryzen CPU and motherboard with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, within the next few months. I think I'll just run gamma ray WUs until I upgrade those components, then switch back to also running gravitational wave WUs.

Trying to run GR and GW gpu tasks will cause you headaches.

Before you enable your GW GPU tasks make sure you set your daily buffer to something like "0.01" or you may find yourself with outsized amounts of GW tasks GPU tasks due to a variable that doesn't handle wildly varying processing times on the gpu in the Boinc Manager.

I finally reached the point where I can run GR GPU tasks and GW CPU tasks on the same system.  I started at "0.01" until I was certain that I wasn't going to be buried (again) in GW tasks.

Tom M

Tom, 

 

Thanks for the advice. For my current card (1050Ti), I found that setting the daily buffer to 0.25 works well, with the system keeping 0.4 days worth of WUs available. When the new card arrives, I will reset the daily buffer to 0.1, with 0.25 worth of available WUs, and see how that works,, gradually increasing until I find the sweet spot.

Eugene Stemple
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@John Tom M advises you to

@John

Tom M advises you to expect "headaches" when running GW and GR gpu tasks.  I have taken up (probably) the worst possible E@H task configuration: i.e. GW gpu -and- GW cpu -and- GR gpu -and- GR cpu applications.  And, yes, those apps fight over their respective completion time estimates and the number of cache tasks.  I've settled on 0.3 day buffer with 0.1 day extra and that seems to give a stable flow of work with no missed deadlines.  On rare occasions one of those app categories will run out of work but the other, i.e. GR or GW, app has work to do so there are no real idle system resources.  I don't really care whether this yields the maximum credit; I am happy to contribute my meager capabilities to any tasks the servers throw my way.  With only one GPU (1060) there is no contention there and within the operating system (Linux) I have constrained my Ryzen 7 to use only 10 of its 16 threads and restricted E@H to 5 concurrent cpu tasks - to ensure adequate cpu resources to drive the gpu.  I do concur that setting the buffer parameters to low values is the best strategy.  And then increasing them slowly while observing the work flow.

 

John Tibbetts
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So I've installed the new RX

So I've installed the new RX 580 GTX video card, and its software and drivers. However, BOINC says my GPU is missing on all my current work units that are awaiting crunching, but the event log shows detection of the new GPU. Am I missing a setting somewhere, either in BOINC or Einstein@home settings? I've clicked Update for the project, but it's still not working. 

 

I'm using Windows 10 x64, and I've switched from an nVidia to an AMD card.

Richie
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John Tibbetts wrote:I've

John Tibbetts wrote:
I've switched from an nVidia to an AMD card.

Tasks that had been already received from project server were assigned to run on Nvidia GPU. One of the tasks for example: https://einsteinathome.org/task/1070680887

There's "Gravitational Wave search O2 Multi-Directional GPU v2.09 (GW-opencl-nvidia)"

Those assignments can't be transformed to AMD afterwards. Just abort those ten tasks still "In progress". You'll get tasks with 'GW-opencl-ati' from now on if everything is working properly. 

"Version" here: https://einsteinathome.org/apps.php

"plan_class" here: https://einsteinathome.org/apps.php?xml=1

Gary Roberts
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John Tibbetts wrote:... I've

John Tibbetts wrote:
... I've switched from an nVidia to an AMD card.

AMD and nvidia use different applications and the tasks you have are 'branded' for the nvidia app.  You are supposed to set no new tasks (NNT) and wait for the existing tasks to finish before changing the GPU.

You have two choices.  You could temporarily reinstall the old card, set NNT and finish those tasks off.  Alternatively, you should just abort the old tasks and get a new batch with a new app download for your new card.  I checked your tasks list and you seem to have just 10 of the old type, so the easiest thing for you to do would be to abort the old ones.  You'll get a temporary reduction in your daily quota which will immediately disappear once you return a new task with your new card - so no big deal.  It might be a different matter if you had hundreds of the old tasks :-).

EDIT:  I took too long and Richie beat me to it :-).

Cheers,
Gary.

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