aetch wrote:Install for everyone.
The C:\ProgramData folder is common to all users and will ensure the FAH client setup is consistent and continues the same work units with the same progress regardless of who is logged in.
The C:\Users\<username>\AppData is individual to each user and would have given different work units and levels of progress depending on who was logged in.
Consideration - CPU thread/cores used
The i7-4770 is a 4 core/8 thread cpu.
By default the CPU slot is set to use -1 (negative one) threads. This is a setting which allows the client to grab as many threads as it can, minus a thread for each gpu.
I would suggest setting the cpu core/thread count to a value from 4 to 6. This is to give the GPU and the OS a bit more breathing room and make your computer a bit more usable during normal use.
At least play around with it and monitor your GPU PPD and general handling of the machine.
Depends on how he 'underclocks' the CPU.
If via Bios he's able to lower the CPU voltage to a stable voltage, he can actually lower temperature without losing any performance at all, or a bit further, losing only few Mhz of boost frequency, vs the temperature drop he's getting from the new setting.
Usually just a few to 100Mhz lower boost frequency, might result in a 10C drop if he originally was running the CPU at 90-95C. or a 5C drop if he was running around 70-80C originally.
Temperatures usually lower quickest from 90C to 80c, and it'll be a bit harder to drop it from 80 to 70C, and even harder from 70C to 60C and so on, without losing massive performance, or the CPU becoming unstable...
If voltage adjustment isn't possible, (the BIOS on such PCs usually don't have much eco control on those early boards), a mild manual underclock on all cores may actually be more beneficial than freeing a thread to lower temperatures.
(that is, if ducting, better case ventilation, and better CPU cooler have all already been exploited).
On many Intel CPUs, releasing 1 thread to the OS is the same as releasing 2 or 3 in terms of lowering temperature; as the entire chiplet doesn't power down, but WUs processing threads will still cycle through them.
Sure a few degrees it may go down, but on some Intel CPUs I've ran, the difference wasn't noticeable until you can actually disable an entire chiplet (usually in bios, where you can disable at least 4 threads or more, for a much lower power consumption).
Granted, mine were 6th and 7th gen CPUs.
I used to disable 1 thread on a quad core system, and the CPU would still use about 98% of prior power draw, but once I disabled a second thread, it dropped down more significantly.
As a simple example to illustrate performance of 7 threads at a lower frequency, vs 6 threads at full frequency would be this:
Imagine if boost clock speeds go down from 3,6Ghz to 3,5Ghz due to underclocking (to keep temps under control), one could say that overall CPU processing gets lowered by 100Mhz per thread (x 7 threads = 700Mhz); all the while having 1 thread more to work with than with the second solution.
7 threads at 3500Mhz vs 6 threads at 3600Mhz is simple math: 7 x 3,6 = 25.2Ghz vs 6 x 3.6Ghz = 21.6Ghz
7 threads perform higher, and in most cases stay cooler too.
Another part is that using 6 threads, the RAM usage will be mostly idle.
7 threads, and RAM usage will increase (but still mostly idle).
A system using more threads, is more optimized.
I believe we did some testing a while ago on folding and data crunching, and quite often we'd find that 10 cores 20 threads is about where RAM usage gets overloaded on a quad channel memory system, and threads will start queueing.
The 3900x sometimes gets threads queueing, which is why it performs about the same on 20 threads as 24 threads.
Once you get more than 20 threads, it's best to buy a higher than quad channel motherboard for memory, although the 3950x still runs ok on quad channel, but overall performance on 32 vs 24 threads is very close... anyway..
Third, The 1660 gets 1 thread assigned for GPU, but in actuality it's only using about a third to half of a thread.
It'll show up as 1 thread at 100% (or 1 thread at 50% + 1 thread at 25%, because it's a hyperthreading CPU), but if you look at the kernel data it's using much less than a full thread, and can easily run on a single thread 1 to 1,5Ghz without being bottlenecked.
That leaves Windows with at least half a thread to work with, which is enough for background tasks, and basic OS functionality.
