Hey guys,
I wanted to report my finding for folding on 2 x GTX 295 Dual-PCB cards.
In the last two days I've been trying to find the driver and setting combination for enabling folding on all four GPU cores on Windows 7 64bit. I've found that the latest
196.21 driver is THE driver for this purpose.
In my humble experience with 2 x GTX 295, folding cores require that multi-GPU mode be enabled and a display be enabled for each GPU core (and desktop be extended for each display). If multi-GPU is disabled, only one of the GPUs on each card will engage even if you have displays extended for each GPU. Likewise, if you don't have an extended display for a GPU, it will not engage for folding. Flat-out EUE's in either case.
Now what the 196.21 drivers enable is exactly this; it lets you enable multi-GPU mode
and it lets you keep displays extended for each GPU. I tried ALL drivers starting with 186.18 till 191.07 and
none of the drivers let you do this; you can extend displays only when multi-GPU mode is disabled. The trick with 196.21 is
you have to remove the external SLI bridge. With the bridge on, the behavior is just as the older drivers; the
older drivers do not recognize the SLI bridge and can enable only "quad-SLI" not "multi-GPU". Last thing is to connect both the DVI and HDMI connectors on the primary card to a physical display; otherwise, the first GPU (to which the HDMI connector is linked) is not recognized. I tried the dummy plug for HDMI with no success. If someone knows how to make a dummy HDMI plug, please let me know!
So, in summary:
1) Connect your display to the primary DVI plug on the primary card.
2) Connect another display (or the secondary connector on the same display, or a working dummy) to the HDMI connector on the primary card.
3) Connect either a real or a dummy DVI plug to each connector of the secondary card.
4) Uninstall your current drivers, use Driver Sweeper to clean-up, remove any SLI bridges and install the 196.21 driver set.
5) Upon restart, you should see (in desktop->rightclick->"Screen resolution") that there are four displays. If any of them is not extended, do extend. It should look like in the first picture below.
6) Go to Nvidia Control Panel and
enable "multi-GPU" mode. If you forgot the SLI bridge on, it will say "quad-SLI" and it's not what we want.
7) If multi-GPU is enabled on your physical display, change the radio button to select "Analog Display (1)".
8) Restart.
9) Ready your folding folders just as WB's:
http://forums.evga.com/tm.aspx?m=27261 In short, make sure that each folding core is assigned a different machine ID and is called with a
"-gpu X" flag. I also suggest using the "-forcegpu nvidia_g80" flag for all cores. My full flag line is this:
"-local -gpu X -forcegpu nvidia_g80 -advmethods -verbosity 9" 10) You should see that the "-gpu 0" core starts on the second GPU of your primary card (that is the GPU connected to your physical display). The others should continue in the order of displays that you see on the "Screen resolution" page. The HDMI display was the 4th and last in my setup and it may well be the case in general. So, do not panic because the first GPU on the primary card will start folding last
I hope this helps someone else struggling to fold on a 2 x GTX 295 (dual-PCB) setup!
post edited by theGryphon - 2010/01/22 21:28:53
