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Message 15785 - Posted: 16 Mar 2010 | 21:38:10 UTC

I got my new PSU yesterday after my last one got fried. (My Bad! I knew that 250W wasn't enough to run an 8800GT even with a nano-BTX mobo & E2180). I reinstalled Linux, because the old one got messed up when the HDD wasn't getting the power it needed before the PSU half-died. Now with my Thermaltake 450W PSU, I reinstalled this time a KDE Mint Linux64. I thought it was just me, despite getting that same Linux to run on annother PC, that I couldn't get tasks running on BOINC, despite everything looking OK. They got downloaded, but only go as far as saying waiting to run. I waited & waited, no luck. I then reinstalled Gnome Mint Linux64, same problem, it was que'ed & I even waited a day, no run.

Now I tried Windows7 64bit. No problem. So now I ask, what's wrong with this? http://www.gpugrid.net/show_host_detail.php?hostid=62706
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Message 15788 - Posted: 16 Mar 2010 | 23:22:23 UTC - in response to Message 15785.

Have you checked to see that the GPU options in BOINC Manager are set correctly? There are new options in the newer versions.
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Message 15789 - Posted: 16 Mar 2010 | 23:33:15 UTC - in response to Message 15788.

Felt as if I tried everything. Still a no go. I had no troubles with Win7, but would like to go back before 30 days, wouldn't want to pay for something I use as a crunchbox.
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Message 15792 - Posted: 17 Mar 2010 | 9:44:12 UTC - in response to Message 15785.

It sounds like a driver issue or Boinc version issue for Linux; unless your drive has errors (Under Windows Right click on the C: drive, select Properties, Tools, Error-Checking, Check now, tick both boxes, select OK and restart the system).

I have a rather small (250W) PSU supporting my Q8400 & GT240 (used as a Media system) on a little Biostar GF750V-M7 motherboard (has NVidia GeForce 7050 Chipset and an nForce 610i southbridge).
The Q8400 is only Overclocked from 2.66GHz to 2.8GHz (5%)and the GT240 is clocked from,
GPU 550MHz, RAM 1700MHz, Shaders 1340MHz,
to,
GPU 612MHz, RAM 1809MHz, Shaders 1491MHz (11%).

Average GPUGrid credit from system is over 10K per day. An 8800GT might be good for games but it is no good for crunching; its basically a waste of Electric!

Do you have one or two?

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Message 15807 - Posted: 17 Mar 2010 | 23:54:30 UTC - in response to Message 15792.

Huh? My 8800GT averages 12k a day?

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Message 15816 - Posted: 18 Mar 2010 | 13:26:09 UTC - in response to Message 15807.
Last modified: 18 Mar 2010 | 13:32:38 UTC

You have a good card then, but such results are becomming less common for that card. Lots of people get failure after failure with the CC1.1 cards, especially the older ones, and lots have stopped crunching because of that. The last set of improvements actually resulted in my GT240s getting over 13K per day. Its hard to keep track of the cards performances now with the techs doing so much good work. For those with good working 8800GT's, you have probably seen two recent jumps in performance of about 50% and then 30-40% and I think there is more to come.

It would be really useful if the techs would put together a list of cards and their task success rates, so people could know what to expect, what cards to buy and which cards to avoid.

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Message 15819 - Posted: 18 Mar 2010 | 18:10:41 UTC - in response to Message 15816.

You have a good card then, but such results are becomming less common for that card. Lots of people get failure after failure with the CC1.1 cards, especially the older ones, and lots have stopped crunching because of that.

While not quite as fast as the one above, my 8800GT never fails WUs.

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Message 15820 - Posted: 18 Mar 2010 | 18:38:07 UTC - in response to Message 15819.

I see you are getting good results with your 8800 GT as well (8.5K/day), and your 9600 GSO is bringing home almost 7K/day too. Weather it is 8K or 12K is not important, just that they work; the amount depends on what else you use the system for and the CPU that backs it up (the same card attached to the same system with a Celeron won’t do anywhere near as well as one attached to an i7 overclocked to 4GHz).

I bet your cards would not be attached to long if they were not getting through the tasks successfully! When a card I have stops bringing home the points (starts crashing tasks) I get rid of it. It may still be a good card for everything else, but if it can’t crunch I don’t want it. I stopped using an 8400, 8600GT, 8800, 8800GTS 512 and a GTS250 for that very reason. Well, actually some were still getting a few results, but the electric is a consideration too, hence the GT240s. For me any more than a 10% runtime loss is too much. If you follow my argument people with a bad card will eventually either replace it or go elsewhere; so they are not likely to shout up about it here now (they won’t be here).

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Message 15834 - Posted: 19 Mar 2010 | 17:44:30 UTC - in response to Message 15820.
Last modified: 19 Mar 2010 | 18:02:57 UTC

Nothing wrong with my cards, it's just the Linux I'm trying to get the thing working with. Windows ain't free. Running crunchboxes as a hobby, is like any hobby, there's a budget. Many people have many different agenda's & things to considder. If I can get a card cheaper then it usually costs, & my electricty bill is not a concern, well, I'll take that 8800GT over a 240GT ANY DAY! If I have something, I'll try to use it. Just because an i7 & a GTX295 is going to do the job better then an e2180 & a 8800GT, DOESN'T MEAN that I'm going to scrap my things, overspend (or maybe take a loan), so that I can have that i7 & x3 GTX295...

BTW, if UR argument is that I'm kill Mother Earth, by not getting a GT240. My argument is that these things don't make themselves. Every time someone scraps a GPU, all the things used to make it, goes to waste, gets sent back to China, & gets "recycled", by a person who doesn't mind dying early. Either that, or it gets burnt &/or burried so that someone else (in the future), can clean up. My argument is that if Linux could make it work before, but all of a sudden doesn't support it, it's in the software. Also, if I were a bit more brave, I'd try to update the ROM (even if it voids the warranty), if it means that I can get CUDA 1.2 but not if I run the risk of killing my card.
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Message 15835 - Posted: 19 Mar 2010 | 19:01:10 UTC - in response to Message 15834.

Did you check the disk drive for errors and test the RAM?
Did you try a different driver?
You could try another flavour of Linux.

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Message 15836 - Posted: 19 Mar 2010 | 19:36:55 UTC - in response to Message 15835.

I tried Mint KDE64 (which was new to that system), tried Mint Gnome64 (which was the original one running before the PSU half died), then installed Windows7 64, just to check if something got fried. Everything is fine, it works on Windows7 64. But it doesn't want to work with Mint anymore. I think it's the updated BOINC Client. I have Mint KDE64 running on annother PC. But something happens when I reinstall, so I hope I won't have to reinstall anytime soon on the PC that works.

I'm planning make use of a HTPC casing, so I'll canibalize until I can afford to upgrade the HTPC. I'll be running Windows7 64 on that HTPC, so hopefully, Mint Linux will be ok again in 2-3 months time, when I put everthing back in my original crunchbox. I hope too, that a cheap GT240 will be available for me to buy when that time comes. The PSU is only half dead, & I'll use my 450W replacement PSU for the HTPC. Hope too that a single slot GT240 will run on a half dead 250W PSU!
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Message 15838 - Posted: 19 Mar 2010 | 19:59:48 UTC - in response to Message 15836.
Last modified: 19 Mar 2010 | 20:01:03 UTC

Be careful when using a dodgy PSU, it could end up costing you a system. The Motherboard is often the first to go, which often leaves you with an old CPU.
I sometimes scavange dead PSUs for their fans, screws and grills - it doesn't all end up in China! If you do buy one anytime soon, dont get a Win Power PSU! You would be lucky to get a year out of one.

Good luck with your projects,

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Message 15843 - Posted: 19 Mar 2010 | 23:18:15 UTC - in response to Message 15838.
Last modified: 19 Mar 2010 | 23:48:41 UTC

Actually, I don't think it's half dead, bad wording from my side. I just think that it suffered a faster than normal capacitor aging due to running an 8800GT 24/7 when it's only a 250W PSU (nice one too)...

Glad to hear that you like to recycle. Wished I could do that too. But UR right about them not all going back to China, some go to India, some to Indonesia, & the rest go to Africa. The thing they're good at recycling too, are the people who run these phony baloney "recycling scams", pity...
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Message 15938 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 14:25:53 UTC
Last modified: 23 Mar 2010 | 14:27:27 UTC

I see two of your systems are running the same kernel, 2.6.31-20 that I use in Ubuntu 9.1 Both of the systems I built would not recognized either a 9800gtx or a gts-250 about 1/2 the time. I could boot maybe 2-3 times in a row before I could see the message "NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+ (driver version unknown, CUDA version 2030, compute capability 1.1, 511MB" in the boincmgr message dialog box. About 1/2 the time I would see "No GPU found" or something like that.

Following a suggestion I read somewhere, I added "Sleep 5" in the boinc-client startup script for "start" in init.d and I have not see this problem since. I have seen other problems unfortunately :-(

What are you seeing in the boincmgr messages? Does 2.6.31-20 see the gpu?

Also, are you seeing any strange behavior when the messages are being displayed by boincmgr? I am seeing a lot of duplicated messages as discussed here

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Message 15939 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 14:38:51 UTC - in response to Message 15938.

I took that system offline. It's not going to be used again anytime soon. I'm building an HTPC & will canibalize on that system. It's goin to run Windows7 64bit. But I am running Mint Linux KDE64 on a PC using a GTX260. No problems there appart from the GPU apearing/disapearing like yours. My solution is reinstalling Boinc Client after every restart, it doesn't bother me, because it's a crunchbox. But the problem with the PC running an 8800GT was that Boinc does recognise the 8800GT, but it doesn't start, it just remains in "Ready to run" & doesn't go anywhere from there, even after 24 hours. Other tasks are running, but even on Mint Linux Gnome64 it also has the same problem, but not on Windows7 64bit.
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Message 15940 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 14:56:41 UTC - in response to Message 15939.

I took that system offline. It's not going to be used again anytime soon. I'm building an HTPC & will canibalize on that system. It's goin to run Windows7 64bit. But I am running Mint Linux KDE64 on a PC using a GTX260. No problems there appart from the GPU apearing/disapearing like yours. My solution is reinstalling Boinc Client after every restart, it doesn't bother me, because it's a crunchbox. But the problem with the PC running an 8800GT was that Boinc does recognise the 8800GT, but it doesn't start, it just remains in "Ready to run" & doesn't go anywhere from there, even after 24 hours. Other tasks are running, but even on Mint Linux Gnome64 it also has the same problem, but not on Windows7 64bit.


I also replaced linux with windows 7, or rather I tried. Unfortuntely, I failed to notice that win 7 home only works with one processor and I had activated it before I discovered I could get only one of my dual opterons to work. I gave that win 7 home premium to one of my kids who was building an i7 for himself. It took two phone calls to microsoft before they allowed him to re-activate it.

If you have time, can you bring up boincmgr on one of you 2.6.31-20 systems and see if there are any dates in the meessage tab that are out of order? I have two 9.1 systems that have totally screwed up message dialog boxes. One is running 6.10.17, the other 6.10.43.

thanks

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Message 15941 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 15:33:42 UTC - in response to Message 15940.

I didn't fully understand your question. Was this what you asked for?

søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Starting BOINC client version 6.10.36 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Libraries: libcurl/7.19.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.15
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Processor: 2 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Processor: 6.00 MB cache
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET OS: Linux: 2.6.31-20-generic
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Memory: 1.96 GB physical, 5.75 GB virtual
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Disk: 581.16 GB total, 545.89 GB free
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Local time is UTC +1 hours
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 260 (driver version unknown, CUDA version 2030, compute capability 1.3, 895MB, 607 GFLOPS peak)
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET rosetta@home URL http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/; Computer ID 1243275; resource share 100
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET World Community Grid URL http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/; Computer ID 1190374; resource share 100
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET FreeHAL@home URL http://freehal.net/freehal_at_home/; Computer ID 22767; resource share 100
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET ibercivis URL http://registro.ibercivis.es/; Computer ID 144177; resource share 100
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET GPUGRID URL http://www.gpugrid.net/; Computer ID 65454; resource share 100
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET ibercivis General prefs: from ibercivis (last modified 20-Mar-2010 01:57:05)
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET ibercivis Computer location: home
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET General prefs: using separate prefs for home
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Reading preferences override file
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET Preferences:
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET max memory usage when active: 1506.91MB
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET max memory usage when idle: 1808.30MB
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET max disk usage: 0.00GB
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET (to change, visit the web site of an attached project,
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:55 CET or click on Preferences)
søn 21 mar 2010 03:30:57 CET Not using a proxy

This PC has been on since the 21st, so I only pasted the start.
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Message 15942 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 16:10:36 UTC - in response to Message 15941.
Last modified: 23 Mar 2010 | 16:25:00 UTC

I didn't fully understand your question. Was this what you asked for?
<SNIP>
This PC has been on since the 21st, so I only pasted the start.


Sorry, I should have explained it better. I have 4 ubuntu systems, two of them have gpu's the others do not. The ones that have gpu's there is something amiss in the way the messages are being displayed.

I bring up the messages on the two machines with gpu's and wait about 5 seconds. Then I scroll slowly down to the bottom of the buffer while watching the dates. About midway thru, the dates start over because the contents of the message have somehow been duplicated. If I wait longer then there are move duplicates. After about 10 minutes of leaving the message box active, there are so many duplicate messages that boincmgr no longer responds and I have to kill it or reboot. This seems to be only cosmetic and does not affect any crunching. There is no lockup if the message dialog box is not being displayed by boincmgr. There is a discussion here but no one else seems to have reported this problem. The problem seems to be related to 9.1 ubuntu with a gpu card as my other 9.1 system (and an 8.04) with same mombos are working fine but they do not have a gpu.

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Message 15944 - Posted: 23 Mar 2010 | 16:28:49 UTC - in response to Message 15942.

I understand now. As I said before, that PC had been on since Sunday, it's Tuesday now, & there has been no looping. I don't recall any on my PC's ever having looped either. I might be wrong, but as I said, I don't recall this even having happened on any of my PC's.
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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : What's up with Linux & 8800GT???

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