Hi All. Just had the two days from hell with my Folding machines. First, I now know why I've never had an ATI card since my 9800XT. The driver package is s**t. As soon as Windows updated I kept getting BSOD caused by atikmpag.sys, I'm currently in the middle of rebuilding my Windows installation as nothing I tried cured it. Then my 8-way KVM failed and took out the mains ring-main last night, causing all the computers to just die, causing a number of issues. Luckily I had a spare KVM and so I'm finally back up and running on all but the new 7970 Folder.
Have to admit I have not had any BSOD's with my HD7970's. (Now that's tempting fate ) Only time they have caused a problem is when I have forgotten to turn folding off and I played a game. This caused the driver to stop responding, but windows 7 handled it ok and dint poop out on me at all. Do you really need to use a KVM? I use Teamviewer on my boxes to control them whenever I need to and its free for non commercial use. Also just realised that the GPU folding is reduced if ANY CPU folding is done on the machine. I.e. on one machine I had HD7970 and i7-4770k and the GPU was getting approx. 100k and cpu approx. 25k. Now with only the GPU I am getting 144K. Probably dependant on wu RCG. (P9401 (R1047, C0, G14) is ace ) Anywho get that HD7970 back up.
GPU drivers ... not the best bits of software ever written - I had problems with my GTX 780's because of the 36hr TDR bug, and I've had several problems trying to update new drivers in Linux KVM's - I used to use KVM's (in fact I've still got two excellent 4-way DVI/USB Avocet units - now collecting dust) and moved to TightVNC on my network. For remote access, I used to use LogMeIn, but they have just started charging for this (outrageous!), so I'm with Scorpuk, i.e. using TeamViewer. Not sure about ATI/AMD GPU's, but the nVidia ones certainly need a spare CPU core to get the best out of them at the moment.
Yeah, they all have TightVNC installed and I do use it, but nothing beats a KVM, (I use old Compaq 8 way ones) if there is a boot problem, and the EVGA680SLI (I still have two of them) has plenty of them, I can see it immediately, I don't have to connect a keyboard, monitor and mouse. The only issue now is that I have to use a USB to PS2 adapter as most motherboards only come with one PS2 connector. Luckily the motherboards I use still have a VGA connector, I use the inbuilt GPU in the CPU as the display chip.
+1 for headless folding machines managed over VNC/TeamViewer. I've been doing that since day one and it's the most convenient option. Just remember to set static IPs You're right as it is pretty useless if there's a boot time issue, but none of mine ever gave me that much trouble with startup. I could boot them up and be starting the clients on them from my phone, tablet or laptop within a minute.
