Anyone else on here using an i7 and NotFreds VM SMP client as im having a weird issue... Because the i7 has Hyperthreading windows is seeing it as 8 cores... So, I start off 2 instances of NotFred and leave it 20 mins come back and they are both reporting back 2400k-ish PPD happily BUT the CPU has only been showing 50% load throughout?! Tried a load of things but I cant make those 2 VMs use any more CPU... I then thought sod it and made another VM which put the CPU usage upto 75% and then thought sod it again and made another one (4 now in total) which has bought the CPU upto 98-ish % so I thought sweet I can run 4 VMs... Now half an hour later of leaving it with the 4 running the 2 original VM's haven't gone up any more percent and the 2 new VM's are still on 0%. I'm a bit confused now but im thinking Hyperthreading is causing these issues? Anyone got any ideas besides try turning HT off? P.S i7 is @ stock 2.8 at the mo, will be overclocking tomorrow
I've never set up Notfreds app on an i7 | jealous face again!), but I'm almost certain that this has something to do with the configuration of the application in your browser. i.e. in 192.168.1.xx. You have to manually set how many cores you want the application to use in there, for my quad core CPU clients it's "SMP instance per 2 CPU's". For the i7 I would imagine it's the same. I Don't know how having 8 logical cores affects the vmware application, but AFAIK it's useless for SMP because it requires more than one physical core per instance. Your CPU should be locked at about 99-100% usage when folding with two (properly set up) VMware SMP instances. For comparison, I have a slightly overclocked Q6600 in the PC I'm writing this on, this morning reporting 2300 and 23500 PPD on it's two VMware SMP instances.
vmware player only supports 2 cores. You need to map those cores to the physical cores not the ht ones (as there's no spare resources for ht to use). It'll show 50% but it'll be running fully loaded if you do 2 instances
Cheers chaps, for the fun of it I left all 4 VM's running overnight and this morning FahMon reported 1790-ish ppd for each which totals just over 7000 ppd total which isnt bad as its still running at 2.7ghz! Must be HT working like you say SAS which is what ive been thinking it is, im going to turn it off when I overclock later on Im running VMware Server 2 not player as this i7 rig is my new home server and running win 2003 enterprise but unfortunatey that only supports 2 CPU's same as player and workstation. My old server was a Q6600 @ 3ghz and like you say Unicorn I ran 2 VM's which produces 2600ppd each and maxed the CPU. Will turn off HT and overclock and let you if how it goes
7K ppd is pretty good for running at stock. I'm currently OCed to 3.6 and have 4 x notfred VMs at 8.8K total whilst also running two GPU clients. I tried turning the HT off and just running 2 x VMs on the physical cores but that dropped it to 7K. The HT would seem to be giving a boost of about 25% in what was admittedly a fairly quick and crude experiment. I'm still tempted to turn VT off again as the CPU draws more juice and runs much hotter for what's a relatively modest gain. I just wouldn't have dreamed of losing the points whilst the CC was on. Congrats on your shiny new toy
Cheers Phoenicis, got the mofo running at 3.8Ghz tonight and stressed it for a while and all seems stable Have turned HT off and left it folding for last couple of hours with 2 VM's running and they are churning out 3850-ish each so 7700-ish total I'm getting temps around 67-68 degrees like this so might leave it for now and then once its re-cased I will try turning HT back on and see what happens, might hit 9k
Congratulations! P.S. On native Linux, 2 x '-smp 4' @ stock 2.6GHz with HT enabled, will net you 3700 PPD per client. Just pointing this out so you can see what you're losing with HT disabled. So the overclock is making the points back for you - just a little north of the stock 2.6GHz with HT PPD, but you really do want HT enabled with the overclock! But you're probably looking at another 10-15 deg C or so, depending on VCore and the HSF used with HT enabled @ 3.8GHz.
Thanks Clive Yeah I fully plan to turn HT back on but like you say the temps will go higher and until my Antec 1200 turns up and I re-case it I will leave it like this for now as the CPU is on about 95% load. I was seeing not far of 80 degress when I was stress testing Oh and I owe you some Kudos mate (coming your way) it was your OC settings that got me going so quick from my other thread, some tiny differences to RAM timings but seems a solid OC
