EVGA GTX460/768
and now for the rest of the story
adding the Palit GTX460 1gb card to the mix
see the 12/17/2010 for the add on.
12/3/2010
Last week I got the bug again to turn up my folding efforts. As you might know I am an addicted folder, see this link, and wanted to turn up my points per day (ppd). Yes ppd is just for bragging rights. I am not going to get rich or anything from it. In fact it is costing me some money just for the electricity. But I feel it is my contribution to society so I fold on. Meanwhile for the last couple of years I have been running 2 graphics cards, XFX 9800GTX+'s, that have served me well. They turn out approximately 11,000 ppd per pair and use about 160w per card. Good points for the amount of electricity they use.
Now I have upgraded. You know the ole Black Friday sales got me and I grabbed 1 EVGA GTX460 768 card. They make this card in two versions, with 768 and 1 gig of memory. I opted for the cheaper card, the 768, because memory for folding really doesn't make much difference. Most, if not all, of the work is done buy the processor (GPU). This card is also rated at 160w so I am burning the same exact wattage yet getting more points per day. A win win for me. Oh and there is some discussion that the 768 card actually only uses 150 watts but I didn't test it so can't confirm.
INSTALLING
I got the card a few days ago and removed one of my 9800's and replaced it with the new 460. The first thing I noticed was that this card is a bit shorter than my 9800 card. The 9800 was very long and almost too long to fit in my case. However this new 460 is at least a half inch (I didn't measure it) shorter and slides in the case quite comfortably. Install was a snap and I fired up the machine. First thing it did was say I had new hardware and wanted to install the drivers for it. The instructions said to cancel out of these messages and run the CD that came with the machine. I really don't like installing anything that isn't necessary so decided to ignore all the warnings, cancel out, and continue without the CD touching my system. I know I have the latest drivers installed for that card as I had updated them a few weeks before. I had some display problems, I am running one 24", one 22", and a 17" LCD display. I have some special software controlling them all and since I got them all set up the way I like them I didn't want anything messing with them.
Anyway after messing around a bit I finally had to reboot to get everything all sorted out. On reboot it again said I have new hardware that needs to be installed. That kind of puzzled me as I know I have the drivers for this card already installed. I cancelled out again and finally all 3 screens came up nice and the way I like them. Whew... had me worried for a minute. I still had this little voice in the back of my head saying something isn't quite right. But of course I have a degree in computer science and I know better. Tongue firmly inserted in cheek. In any case I continued on. Got my GPU folding program and reconfigured it for this card. This is one of the new Fermi processor cards and it can run bigger and better folding work units (wu). So I installed and configured everything to run this new bigger folding program. Fired it up and she took off like a dream. No muss, no fuss. Kind of scary really. lol
TEMPERATURES
I then wanted to know how hot things are. If you have read any of my other testing you will know that I am quite adamant about not running things hot. If I had my choice, and lots of money, these computers would all be running on liquid nitrogen. But alas being a mere mortal I just run them on air cooling, I do spend some bucks to improve the cooling as much as I can. So I fired up my old trusty GPU-Z program and took a look at the temps. GPU is running at about 61C well within the safe boundaries of this processor. Oh I forgot, I installed a program called MSI afterburner and turned the fans on the card up to 90%. I always do this to keep the temps low. The drivers for this card have a program that runs the fans according to the temperature. As the temp goes up so does the fan speed. Since I run these things at 100% load 24/7 I just always turn up the fans. In any case GPU temps are great in the 60's. I am unsure about the max temps you can safely run but have seen folks that say you can run them close to 100C. Not me I get nervous any time I am in the 70's. So it was nice to see the temps in the 60's.
In modifying my system I have cut a hole in the cover on the side and installed 2 120mm fans that blow in on the video cards and the CPU. So my cooling is pretty good. I have a lot of airflow blowing in on those components. Complete with dust filters to keep the dirt out. I tend to always put more fans blowing in than blowing out. Just my preference, and there are those that will argue that you should keep the case at a negative pressure, in other words more fans exiting air than blowing in. I tend to always put more in than outs in the fan department. My reasoning is that I would rather not be pulling air in all the cracks, and devices such as DVD burners and such. Dust etc collecting in these devices just is not something I care for. By pressuring the case slightly I tend to blow out all the cracks and crevices. Just my choice for keeping my system clean.
THE MISSING INSTALL BITS
After running this a while and adjusting this thing and doing that thing. I had to reboot to get some other settings straightened out. When I did it again it said I had new hardware to install. Now I am really puzzled as it is running fine, has all the displays up and looking good and no indications that anything is wrong. What could it want to install? Well I cancelled out of the messages again and got out the CD that came with it. Putting it in the CD tray I fired up the CD. A menu popped up and listed different software's and things offered by the CD. Of course I didn't want to install the drivers as I knew my drivers were newer than the ones shipped. But I was still puzzled by the system telling me something was amiss. So finally I just let it do its thing and it installed some sound drivers that the card needed. Seems there is some sort of sound hardware that shows up as NVIDIA high definition audio in the device manager. Not really sure what these are but they installed just fine and it left my video drivers alone so I am a happy camper. Someday I may even take a look at that high def sound thingy but for now I am more interested in folding.
OVER CLOCKING
Now that everything is running well and nice and cool I went out on the internet to take a look at what others are doing with their 460's. I was getting about 10k ppd folding and was very happy with that but I wanted to see how that compared to others. In my reading I ran across others who were over clocking their card. Not by a little bit but by a lot! So I started looking into it. As long as it doesn't hurt my card I figured I might give it a chance. To make a long story short I used MSI Afterburner and it was a breeze to bump this card up. The original clock speeds were core/memory/shader, 675/800/1350. With a little coaxing I got mine to 882.3/1000/1760. I did not touch the voltages. I try not to increase them if I don't have too. Again, heat, power consumption, etc are major concerns here. My temps went up slightly to 63c which also tells me the card is pretty happy running at those speeds. I didn't try to push this any harder than that. I felt that was adequate and any more speed and I would just be using more power with little gain. My ppd went up to over 11K so I did benefit from the overclock.
CONCLUSION
I have to say all in all I am very happy with this card. EVGA has one of the best warranties in the business, the card is small and compact, although it does use two slots, and it is very powerful without using a lot of electricity. All winners in my book. In a few weeks I plan on buying another one to add to my folding regiment. Meanwhile I have a couple of 9800GTX+'s to sell.
12/17/2010 - Adding the Palit GTX460 1GB card
I purchased a Palit GTX460 1GB card the other day to add to this machine. Yep you can hear Tim the Toolman saying More Power.. hehe. So now I will be getting ready to install it in this machine and removing the remaining 9800GTX+ card. I must say the 9800 had done me well and is still a very good contender for making lots of points for the folding project. But alas I will be putting them away for now. I say for now because I have actually embarked on a new adventure. I am going to be building a new I7 machine. If these 2 9800's don't sell pretty quick then I am just going to put them in the new machine.
Now back to the subject at hand. This new Palit card is a little different than the EVGA. As you can see the EVGA has 768mb ram while the Palit is a 1GB card. Also the memory bus is slower on the 768 card vs the 1GB card. I.E. 192 bit vs 256 bit. Also the 768 has 24 ROP's vs 32 for the 1gb card. What the heck an ROP is I am not sure but my sole objective over the next few days is to see if there is any point per day (ppd) advantage to one card over another. That is folding talk for how much work these things can do. If you are not aware of folding see this link for more information.
The other objective here is to determine just how much power is being consumed by these cards. I have seen reports of both cards using the same and others that say one card used more than the other. In any case in the next few days we will know exactly, well within a watt or two, how much each of these cards uses. I will be using my trusty Kill-A-Watt meter to measure all wattages.
Leveling the field
In order to do the next installation and tests I am returning the EVGA to all stock settings so as not to confuse the numbers. We may try overclocking it again afterwards. The Palit card tends to run a little hot, up in the 70's. The first card I got actually died on me after running 5 hours at 74c. There is some controversy about the VRM's running a bit hot. So I created a fan profile that ramps up the fan speed once the temps reach the 50c range. I have been running both cards now for 2 days and my temps are in the high 50's so I am quite pleased.
Wattage
I mentioned above that I burned up one card. Well I don't know for sure what caused its demise but suspect the VRM's overheated. I got really funny indications of what was wrong and wasted about 2 days of testing before I finally just took the card back and got another one. Glad I bought this one at Microcenter and did not have to wait for shipping etc, especially since it is the Christmas holidays.
Just a preview of the numbers but basically the 1gb Palit card uses a couple of watts more than the 768mb EVGA card. No big deal really but as far as I can tell the points earned per day are the same. So my conclusion is I probably wouldn't spend any extra money on the 1gb card, at least for folding.
One important thing I noticed during my trials involves the Windows screen saver. I use the one with the Windows logo, I didn't test any of the others. In any case I happened to be running some tests and not paying particular attention to the machine when she went into screen saver mode. I happened to glance down at the watt meter and noticed the wattage had dropped 30 watts! I was dumfounded. I tested this several ways and sure enough every time she dropped into screen saver she would go down 30 watts in power. Great stuff here. So thinking I could even do better I went into power management and told it to turn off my video after 10 minutes. I let the machine set and watched it drop 30 into screen saver mode (5 minutes) then at 10 minutes she turned off the video. The wattage went right back up to where it was originally! So much for power management! Oh well so I turned the power management thingy off altogether and went on with my testing.
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EDIT: DUMMY ME 12/30/2010
I found my 30 watts I was saving. Seems when the screen saver would kick in the EVGA card was actually downclocking itself to about half speed (405 core)! So now I am worried that all my points etc below may be corrupted by it. I will have to go back and redo a lot of the tests to make sure that is not the case. Meanwhile forget the screen saver idea. She is turned off on this machine.
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The numbers you see below
will be the wattage for the entire system. I got out my trusty Kill-A-Watt meter
and plugged the machine into it. It doesn't include the LCD screens as I have
them on a different circuit. Speaking of which, I never tested if it made any
difference how many screens your using. My setup is a 24 and 22" Dell running on
the EVGA card and a 19" Hitachi on the Palit card. Resolutions are 1920 X 1200,
1680 X 1050, and 1280 X 1024 respectively.
I am also doing all this under Windows XP 32
bit. Soon I will change to Windows 7 64 bit but these tests were all under XP. I
am really not expecting any difference with Windows 7 though.
Bottom Line
My first test I was looking at the difference in idle wattage. Although interesting I decided to change it and test everything under full load as what really counts here is the loaded machine. After all this system runs 100% loaded 24/7 so that is where the real savings or cost will be. Bottom line is my Palit 1gb card uses only a couple of watts more than the EVGA 768 card. I also took a look at the folding numbers and couldn't see much if any difference between the two cards*. Both cards are producing about 10K ppd on a 6806 wu. So my conclusion is the 1gb card certainly is not worth spending more money on as the benefit is not there. The wattage numbers are below:
Tests after new card and fan
profile modified
Idle with EVGA GTX460/768 in machine only - 155w
Full load with EVGA GTX460/768 folding - 220w
Full load with EVGA GTX460/768 folding and SMP folding - 253w
Idle with Palit GTX460/1gb in machine only - 160w
Full load with Palit GTX460/1gb folding - 222w
Full load with Palit GTX460/1gb folding and SMP folding - 255w
Idle with both cards installed - 178w
Full load with both cards folding - 343w
Full load on cards and SMP folding added - 371w
* NOTE: Folding numbers. As we all know no two work units are exactly the same. So when we fold different wu's we get different times. That is why it is so difficult to figure out if one card folds faster than another. However I went back over the folding results for the last couple of days and crunched some numbers. Taking the logs of both cards and the fact that both were folding the same "class" of work unit (6806) I thought maybe I can figure out if this Palit 1gb cards is faster or not. So... taking the data for 9 work units on both cards, the Palit card folded them in 29 hours 3 minutes 34 seconds. The EVGA 768 card folded them in 29 hours 9 minutes and 35 seconds. So over the course of 29 hours there was a difference of only 6 minutes. Since these two cards were not folding the exact same wu I feel the numbers don't show us much of a difference if any. Again for folding I feel both cards will get you the same results.**** See my edit above. Seems I had a little problem I didn't see while testing. I will have to do it all over again. 12/30/2010
System change
All the above was done on a Q8200 quad core with the standard Intel cooling. After finishing my testing above I got ambitious and decided to install my new CPU and cooler. I had purchased a Q9550 which runs at 2.83ghz and a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus for cooling. In order to install the cooler I had to remove the motherboard as the backing plate installs on the back side. So I pulled it all apart and installed. CoolerMaster's instructions are pretty spartan. By that I mean it just doesn't say much and is obvious that they were written by someone to whom english is not their first language. I won't say they are bad but they certainly are not good. Also, I know I am getting older and my eyes are not as good as they used to be but the illustrations showing you how to install it were just too small. Funny thing, they had some blow up pictures of how the mounting should be and I had to get out a magnifying glass to see them. I finally gave up on the instructions and just used common sense.
Having said all that about the Hyper 212 Plus let me tell you how happy I am with the result. First off both CPU's use 95w of power according to Intel, so I didn't expect much difference in temps. The 8200 used to run at 60c under full load. This new Q9550 under the CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus runs at 40 to 49c! I was very impressed! I love this cooler. I even had to remove one of my 120mm case fans that I had installed on the side to push more air into and on the CPU. Even with that removed I got the above temps.
I actually purchased two of these by accident (don't ask it was black Friday after all) and had planned on selling one of them. Not now! I am planning a new build, an I7 950 machine and I am going to use the extra cooler on that one. CoolerMaster has done a fine job on this cooler in my opinion.
Some people have been asking if the Hyper plus will fit this or that. Here is a pic of the box that details most dimensions:
UPDATE 1/5/2010
OVERCLOCKING
For the last couple of weeks I have overclocked both cards. Still with everything I see both cards continue to pull about the same PPD on folding. The EVGA card easily went to 882.3/900/1760 but the Palit card would only do 850/900/1800 without downclocking. This is all at stock voltages. I was quite happy with the temps as the EVGA card is doing around 57C and the Palit 60C. However the Palit card sometimes creeps up to 63C. No problem since the GPU's are capable of much higher temps. Or so I thought.
I noticed the temps on the Palit creep up to 64C the other day and although not worried I thought I would keep an eye on them. Then I noticed the wattage of the machine dropped 30 watts or so and the GPU temp dropped to low 50's. Hmmm wonder what caused that. I brought up my ole trusty GPU-Z and the Palit card had downclocked to 405 or 2d levels. Nothing would make them go back up except a reboot. To help the machine I turned up the fan profile a bit more and turned down the Palit to 840 core speeds. Rebooted and she has run a couple of days just fine. Still edging up to 61C once in a while but no higher.
I have been experimenting with more fans etc and stumbled across a post on Hard Forums from a couple of guys (R-Type & DeFex) that talked about using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo on their cards. Although their cards are from a different manufacturer I thought this might be a good idea. Besides, some time back I had installed an Accelero 2 on my X1950 pro card and had great results. So I emailed Arctic Cooling and we shall see.
Meanwhile I found out that Arctic Cooling made a heat sink kit specifically for the GTX460 card so I ordered it. Since I am doing testing anyways I also ordered an infrared temperature probe so I could see exactly where all the heat was in this card. In any case once the temp probe gets here I will do a good study looking for heat. What do you want to bet that it is mostly coming from the VRM's. I ordered all this from the folks at www.FrozenCPU.com whom I have dealt with many times over the years. OH and no I don't get any kick back from mentioning them. I just do it in case your looking for the above items. Actually this is a mounting kit for the Accelero but it includes all the heat sinks and is inexpensive at $13, the number is VR005. I couldn't find it in the menu's but if you use the search it comes right up. Here is a picture.
Once I have the heat located I plan on taking the card apart and applying the heat sinks and retesting for heat. I will post all this info here, including how much I can overclock the card. I am thinking this will make this card much more reliable.
UPDATE 1-10-2010
More Temperatures and heatsink mods
Tonight I started investigating temps and modifying my card. I took the side panel off the machine as I need to shoot the temp probe at the card while things are running. I fully expected to find some very hot spots on the card. A little peak into the results is that I did not. Yep the VRM's are hotter than the rest of the card but not by that much. Look at the picture below. This was all under full folding load. Temps reported in GPU-Z were 70C. Notice you could not get that temp on the back of the GPU.
One note is that with the case open and the 120mm fan NOT blowing on the card the GPU temps went way up. Temps went to 70C, sometimes 71C. Now I expected the card to down clock at any minute but it sat there and ran at those temps for over an hour. No down clock or any other abnormalities. The case closed with the fans blowing on the card takes the temp down to 60-61C. So there is quite a difference.
I am a bit dumbfounded at this as I was convinced the VRM's were overheating. Now I am not so sure. Especially since the temps I recorded on the back of the card never got much more than 73 or 74C. I am still going to add the heat sinks as I don't want even the VRM's running hot. Besides, now I think I might experiment with upping the GPU voltage to get more of an overclock. I couldn't do that before as I was worried about the VRM's.
GPU voltage is at .9870 so it can easily be increased. My EVGA card runs at 1.0375v so I know I can take this one higher. Once the heat sinks are installed I will try overclocking the card some more. Present clocks are 838.9/900/1680, Core, Memory, Shader, respectively.
UPDATE 1-11-2011
Here are some pics of the card and the heat sink kit. I only used 4 of the MANY heat sinks. So have a bunch left over.
Here are some before and after pics:
One problem. You see the memory chips shown above. This heat sink does not touch any of them. There is at least a 1/4" or more gap between the heat sink and the memory chips. I guess they just didn't want to machine them to mate with the GPU AND the Memory chips at the same time. Above you can also see the installed heat sinks, compared to the pic above it without heat sinks. That should help some. I am going to let the card run at load overnight then shoot temps on the back of the card. I am hoping the VRM area, especially at the lower regions, has cooled down some.
I am contemplating cutting away the stock heat sink to expose the memory chips and put a heat sink on each one. It will depend a lot on how well it over clocks now with the VRM heat sinks. We shall see.
1-12-2011
Heatsink added results
After adding the heat sinks shown above I ran the card for about 24 hours at full load. I pulled off the side cover again and with my temperature probe measured the heat at the back of the card. Just as I did in the above photo. The results were pretty good actually.
Temp before Temp after heatsinks added
73.5 69C
71 66C
66.5 62.8C
57.5 56C
So the temps were reduced quite a bit by adding the heatsinks. Up to 5C was shaved off the temps. I consider that worth the effort. My next step is to add another fan blowing directly on the middle of the Palit card and some overclocking. Since I already have the core clock at 838 or so I know I won't get a lot more but every little bit helps.
Oh and one more thing, I again went around the card with the temperature probe looking for hot spots. None were found just as in the first time. But it pays to be thorough.
