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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: GPU Support Forum
Thread: NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 vs. WCG's GPU Processing |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 3
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jgk314
Cruncher Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 2 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Is the NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 really able to handle WCG's GPU processing? It is not on the WCG list of cards unsupported for GPU processing, but I have had a number of system lockups which apparently were caused by WCG's use of this card's GPU.
In November I bought a new Dell XPS 8500 with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 installed by Dell. Note that this is a single slot (OEM?) version of the 620. Per GPU-Z: 48 unified shaders, 4 ROPs, GPU clock 810 MHz, shader 1620 MHz. The PC is running Windows 7, which I brought fully up-to-date with patches. I installed World Community Grid BOINC 6.10.58 and have run it 24/7. After a few days I started getting PC lockups -- black screen, keyboard and mouse inoperative, but power button lit white. I had to hard boot each time. This happened about a dozen times over three weeks. I found many video hardware errors recorded in Windows 7's Reliability History. Here is an example of the detailed report for one:
These errors were not listed in the Windows 7 system log, however. (Why?) The system log did show two errors, which I suspect were related to the basic problem, saying "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." I also noted some "computation errors" in the WCG records. None of the recorded errors were exactly at the time of a lockup. I guessed that if a lockup occurred, the system was so clobbered that it did not have time to record the error causing the crash. On the other hand, if the error could be recovered from, then it was recorded. From the above I assumed the video card or its driver was behind all this. First I thought maybe WCG was driving the CPUs so hard that cycles were not left to the video driver to recover from an error in time. Anyway, I installed the latest drivers from NVIDIA (a release later than what Dell had installed). That seemed to lessen the lockups, but they still occurred occasionally. Dell then replaced the video card, but I still got a lockup a day later while using the replacement card. Finally I disabled WCG's GPU processing (changed to "Use GPU never"), which previously had been set to allow use of the GPU when the PC was not in use. (Subsequently I saw in WCG > Results Status > Errors that there had been MANY instances of "ERROR: Kernel execution time estimate too high, exiting." which had all occurred before I had disabled the GPU processing.) After disabling GPU processing I have run well over four days with no more lockups. I am a long-time user of WCG. The program had run with no problems on my old PC and previous video adapter (which WCG does not use for GPU processing). It took me longer than it should have to figure out the likely cause of the lockup problem for a new PC, now hopefully solved. Should this card be put on the WCG GPU unsupported list? Jeff |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Think the 620 has been mentioned and discussed several times. Not a really strong GPU workhorse.
----------------------------------------My experience with a lower order GeForce card was regular video driver crashes during system use [W7/W8], and GPU crunching during system use enabled [and many GPU tasks erroring out]. After specifying not to run GPU tasks during use, and only (re)start them after 5 minutes idle, made results validate. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Dec 17, 2012 3:54:19 PM] |
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jgk314
Cruncher Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 2 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thanks, Rob. I knew the 620 was at the low end of the video card scale,
but since it was not included in the WCG GPU unsupported list, I decided to give it a try for GPU processing. For several days it seemed to work fine. I was having some other problems with the new PC (those are now all sorted out) and it took a while to determine that the cause of the lockups that had suddenly started was likely the WCG GPU processing. When I was having the lockups, I had set WCG not to do CPU or GPU processing while the PC was in use. The idle time setting was always two minutes or greater. If I allowed GPU processing, sooner or later a lockup would occur. With GPU not allowed, no lockup has occurred for five days now (ditto no video hardware or WCG WU errors). When I did have GPU processing enabled, I assume it was just a luck of the draw about what particular HCC WUs I received to say whether a lockup would happen or if just a "computation error" or other soft reject occurred instead. I sometimes went for days without a lockup, but actually was having a lot of (recoverable) video problems in the interim, as I later found from the logs. I searched the WCG forums, but didn't find another reference to the problem I had seen, so I put together the original post. Dell had made this video card the default in some XPS 8500 configurations; other 620 WCG users may well come looking for answers if they get lockups. I also wonder if the card Dell includes is a standard GeForce GT 620, i.e., like a boxed card that someone might buy in a store, or if it is a modified, Dell OEM, version. That's why I included the GPU-Z readouts. (I forgot to include in that post that my card has 1 GB of memory.) The NVIDIA website shows two types of 620 cards with different specs. One is a 620 OEM and the specs listed for it seem closer to what GPU-Z shows for mine than those listed by NVIDIA for the non-OEM 620 card. But then the NVIDIA spec pages say take everything with a grain of salt -- what the Add-in-card manufacturer finally provides is what counts. Both my PCs use Core i7s, so I can still get a lot done for WCG without doing GPU processing. I'm now even running WCG "while the computer is in use" with no problems. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 video card works fine for everything else I do. Someday I may upgrade to a more powerful card, but that's not urgent now. I just wanted to get rid of the random lockups and seem to have accomplished that by setting WCG Activity > "Use GPU never". I hope these posts will be helpful to others. Jeff |
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