Re: Mining board with 8x zotac p106
Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2020 10:54 am
Pcie bus load can be seen in a gui, in nvidia-X server, where also your fan speed and gpu frequency is displayed.Foliant wrote:That destroyed my thoughts about the speed of research that happens.PantherX wrote:[...]Foliant wrote:...can someone explain what the "Average performance" in "ns/day" is meaning?...
Here's an image which shows the various time-scales to put things in preservative:
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Artic ... 8-g001.jpg
Source -> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00258/full
[...]
There is the need for more Hardware.
FYI I managed to get a 1050 (should be close but below the P106-090) for testing.
Tested under Windows because i dont know how to track PCIe-Bus-Load under Linux.Code: Select all
PCIe 3 16x Project: 16920 (5,30,62) TPF: 1,54 Bus: 46% Average performance: 75.6567 ns/day PCIe 3 16x Project: 16920 (26,15,74) TPF: 1,54 Bus: 46% Average performance: 75.2613 ns/day
So maybe a 1060 / P106 is max for a PCIe2 1x SlotCode: Select all
PCIe 2 1x Project: 13422 (6078,69,1) TPF: 7,45 Bus: 73% Average performance: 36.7973 ns/day PCIe 2 1x Project: 13424 (1822,11,0) TPF: 7,36 Bus: 71% Average performance: 18.9391 ns/day
Regards,
Patrick
From your numbers, that 1050 is already operating at 50% performance on a 2.0 x1 slot. The performance of a faster gpu will only run at an even lower percentage.
A pcie bus load of above 60-75% is pretty much bottlenecked.
It means that for 60-75% of the time, the pcie bus is utilized above 50%, with plenty of peaks of 100% utilization.
While for games or other applications, 75% loads are occasional (eg: the changing of a scenery, the loading of new textures), for fah it matters a lot more. FAH accesses the pcie hundreds to thousands of times per wu, and each time you'll lose some PPD, as the gpu waits for all instructions to be loaded. The longer it takes to load, the more gpu cycles you lose in time.
You can also see loading times in the gpu subsection of the windows task manager. If your gpu (compute 0) has slight dips in it's 90-100% load, it means it's waiting for instructions, thus most likely pcie bottlenecked.
For running GPU tests on pcie 2.0 slots, Linux is really recommended,because it has less pcie overhead, and chances are a 1050 can still operate relatively well.
My estimation is, that since a 2060 needs a 2.0 x8 slot or higher in linux, a 1060 3GBrunning roughly at half the speed, I guess would need a 2.0 x4 slot, and a 1050 an x2 slot.
I personally believe, that pcie 2.0 x1 speeds are a bottleneck for most modern day computers. They may not bottleneck a pc running 1,6Ghz, with a GT 1030, but even if your gpu is this speed or slower, your cpu will more than likely be 50% (or more) faster.
And thus guarantees a slowdown at the pcie lanes for Fah.
FAH being largely dependent on the speedy completion of WUs.
So while it's entirely possible to use pcie 2.0 x1 slots for folding, you'll be wasting a lot of power, run the system very inefficient, and hold back the GPUs from running at their fullest potential, as they're waiting for instructions from the CPU.
Like said, pcie 2.0 x8 or below, really benefits from Linux. Especially if running faster GPUs.