Folding Forum

Hey all,

Yesterday, I tried to set up my mining rig to fold and it didn't go well. I have the latest Hive OS 5.4.0 #108 (Ubuntu based) installed with the latest nVidia drivers N465.31. Hive automatically downloaded F@H from its repository and installed that. Now the problems begin. I have 5 RTX 3090 FTW3s installed. F@H saw 4. Looking at the logs, it always will see card0 as a beta and exclude it, even after swapping things around. My PSU is 2000 watt, so good there. When I finally got it going with just 4, my hash rates were between 30 and 55 H/s. I am not familiar with F@H hash rates, so... it just seems VERY low to me. Heats never got over 50c, and mostly stayed in the 40c +- range. I just left the fans at 98% though if I wanted, I suppose I could have put them on auto. These cards are silly quiet, so I didn't go insane. lol. I experimented all over the place with clocks and volts, starting with stock to undervolted, over, underclocked, over... it just didn't matter. The BIOS is set for mining with >4g enabled, etc. and the MoBo is a mining board with 12 pcie ports. MoBo power is plugged in as is the CPU power.

I would really like to get this up and running but it just has me utterly perplexed. Any help would be greatly appreciated. What did I miss? lol

FaH is not mining - and it needs a quite different setup to maximise use of gpus - whereas mining needs minimal cpu interaction and manages with PCIe x1 and part cpu core support FaH folding requires a lot of interaction between the cpu and the gpu so I'll throw a quick "rough and ready" answer that may point you in the right direction but I a sure someone from the multi gpu fraternity will weigh in and help in greater detail.

My guess is that you are potentially both PCIe limited and possibly also cpu core limited ... FaH needs a far greater PCIe contribution to running GPUs than you may be used to for mining - indeed iirc (someone will correct me) you will need at least a PCIe3x16 slot to keep a RTX3090 gpu happy - you will also need at least one cpu core to service each gpu (at a minimum).

This thread https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php? ... =Multi+gpu may be worth your while reading.

Ok, that makes perfect sense. With that in mind, lets say I want to only fold on one GPU. Assigning GPUs in T-Rex is easy and done. Assigning a GPU in F@H is not. I know the GPU slot for sure I am assigning to FAH, but it keeps giving errors until I looked at the logs carefully. The autoconfigured line for the GPU looks like this:
<slot id='4' type='GPU'>
<pci-bus v='5'/>
<pci-slot v='0'/>
</slot>

I copied this to Hives F@H config and this gave me slot 3. I assigned 0 - 2 and 4 in T-Rex and now all are living mostly in peace together. I say mostly because Hive isn't reporting on Foldings progress in the web applet, but I am watching it proceed happily on the display at about 1% per 85 seconds. I am pretty certain it is getting data choked as the power draw is only 242 watts on a 420 - 450 watt card. That's fine, it's doing something. Also, I didn't want to go too overboard on the poor Celeron 4930.

Thank you very much for your help, it pointed me in exactly the direction I needed.
Randy

Edit to add: Looking at the project running and the expected finish time for a 3090, it looks like I am running about half speed, so maybe 2 to 2.5 mil ppd. Not bad really considering everything and still much better than I was doing before I configured the rig to fold.

You may find that FaH does underutilise your 3090 as many projects are not necessarily optimised for such a powerful gpu (yet) ... A way of judging how well your setup is doing would be to look at your Points Per Day (ppd) - iirc a 3090 should be achieving something like 5.7 to 6.3 million ppd ... there are 3090 folders who may well weigh in on how to optimise these.

Though as you point out your celeron may be struggling to cope

Something else that is obvious, but went past me... Folding will run one GPU per core. I have a 2 core CPU with hyperthreading. This is why only 4 instances of folding would happen. It's the simple things, eh? So, I now have 3 GPUs mining and 2 Folding. Sheesh, that was a chore. lol

I am really not a multi gpu specialist but you might find just running one 3090 preferably on a x16 slot with affinity set to two cores and then use the rest of the gpus mining on the other two cores ... getting a single 3090 working properly should get you 5.7 to 6.3 ppd which by the sounds of it will easilly out perform the two you are using - and it will also turn around the wus quicker which is good for science ... Having said that I would struggle to do what I suggest on windows - how to set it all up on your kit with hive I have no clue but if you can you may well produce more output for FaH and have more output from mining so best of both worlds !! ... The other option would be to upgrade your mobo/cpu setup and get folding on all four 3090s