damric

For ETF, where you run a card 24/7, I take 3 things into consideration. 1) Power efficiency. You don't want to run up your electricity bill or cause global warming. Otherwise I'd run my VEGA 64 with the power limits unlocked at 1800MHz. 2) Overclock headroom. The handicap multipliers are based on the LARS database which is supposed to be based on base clocks (really it's random as hell). The winners will be the cards that overclock to perform much higher than the LARS baseline. We have figured out that it's best to run a card for a week or so at stock clocks with the LARS dark mode enabled to feed it baseline data before you enter it into competition. Then be sure to disable the LARS dark mode plug-in when you run overclocked or you will bork up your handicap like I did a few months ago because I didn't know any better. 3) Can it effectively complete WUs in a reasonable amount of time. I'm having this problem with my GTX 750. While it is efficient and overclocks well, it seems to have some very gimped compute performance. I'm going to switch back to my HD 7850 as soon as I get my water loop rebuilt, hopefully this week. Michele is having the same problem with her GT 730 so I ordered her a GTX 465 for $25 on ebay. Supposedly Fermi has good compute performance and that model has good OC headroom (in theory) since it has a huge portion of weak shaders disabled from the 480 core. lol the first picture with the baby MSI card actually has all power connectors plugged in, because there's only 2, the CPU and motherboard. I'll take some more pictures this week. If you are curious, it took me about 2 bars of aluminum angle which I cut into 10 inch pieces to fit the 9.5x9.5" mATX motherboard tray. This time I used rivets instead of screws to fasten it together and it's very strong.

@firedfly Michele was offline for about 36 hours while I built her ETF bench from aluminum angle. Ethan spray painted it black. I think it looks mean asf. Ethan said it looks better with the GTX 980, but I told him that's going in Rachel's rig. I did order a better tweaker GPU from ebay for Michele which should hopefully arrive soon to replace this crummy GT 730 which doesn't seem to earn many points despite being juiced to the gills. Here a couple pics with it up and running.

Oh that case is sexy asf.

Honestly BWG needs that bench frame for all of them damn cards he's cooking. On a related note, I'm building another open bench this weekend for Michele and her little ETF rig. Hers has been just sitting on a table.

Ooh I know my son Ethan is going to want this AIO for his Ryzen rig. It looks very good. I love prizes

I need to show that to Michele. She's an even bigger more obnoxious Metallica fan than I am

Already having hardware trouble. Every time I come back it's been crashed. I've been helping with hurricane repairs for my buddies in Louisiana so I do not have time to troubleshoot my etf rig. I moved the card to an empty slot in my main rig as a bandaid measure and set it to fold at stock. Hopefully I'll get some time this week to delve into this further.

Mother of all sandbags those are some high multipliers this month. This should be highly interesting. My goals 1) not explode my etf rig. 2) not drive up the power bill too high and piss off Michele! 3) Bring big points to Out of Beta!

@BWG @zodac @Supercrumpet @firedfly @tictoc Question on the ETF manual rules for hardware swapping, 1x with hardware failures. If your hardware fails and you switch to a back-up card, can you switch back to the original card once you get it in working order? Would that charge you any hardware swaps or would you still be able to do one more swap? Example: My HD 7850 rig exploded last month so I switched over to my Vega 64. That was a freebie swap, right? What if I cleaned up the mess and want to switch back to the HD 7850? Does that charge a swap or would I still have 1 more swap not due to hardware failures?

@BWG @Supercrumpet Michele is pissed about the power bill. No more Vega 64 folding (well unless * breaks again). Next month I will fold on my GTX 750 since I can run that OC'd with very little juice. I know you will have to switch around the AMD/Nvidia/Wildcard slots.

Power is out on the gulf coast, including my folding.

Weird. I have been getting the same USB overload warning on my folding rig. I think windows did something stupid.

I am going out of town for a few days so I dialed my Vega 64 up to +50% power limit from -50%. Finishing strong!

Hah, I was going to post it in EVGA FTW fanboys.

When your ACX fans disintegrate, you got to pull out the Wraith Stealth fans.

That one have voltage control or is that all just on stock voltage. What a beast!

Thank you sir!

Yeah I never have had problems with good old barbs with zip ties. I'm probably going to go back to using those. The cheap vinyl seems to have become too soft, though it's never been overheated or anything. I'm going to check out better materials when I rebuild.

Trust me I laugh at all of it, because there are funny parts everywhere. Poor Michele. She felt so bad that she went and bought me a new work light since my old one got lost. I think she went and bought me like 3 or 4 small presents today when she went out shopping. That light came in handy for inspecting the PCB. When I went to look at my radiators, man they were caked with dust, another hose fitting slipped out. I guess I'm lucky I didn't have disaster sooner with these cheap vinyl hoses. I just pulled the whole loop apart since it already drained on the floor I'm going to wash and flush everything and I threw out all of that trash vinyl hose. I'm going to get something a bit sturdier.

OMG. I think I fixed it. Ok so I noticed I lost some coolant from my reservoir on my ETF rig when I also noticed it was OFF. I pulled it apart last night and this morning. After looking it over it appeared that it leaked from a loose hose right on the CPU block (probably because I adjusted the frame's feet on Thursday and shook it around). I cleaned up the board but it still wouldn't act right. I suspected it leaked directly into the CPU socket, though it was hard to tell because it must have been a tiny amount of coolant and it must have evaporated quickly. The coolant I use is mostly distilled water, but it's most definitely conductive because of the metal additives I mixed. The titanium dioxide left a little white residue on the plastic socket cover where it dried. I knew I had to get that AM4 socket guard off so I could inspect and clean any residue. I've never been able to remove one of those without breaking it, but at this point I figured I already broke the mobo and maybe the CPU so what the hell might as well try. I watched a video or two on youtube where this little girl carefully takes a precision screwdriver to remove the plastic socket cover, and she made it look so easy. 5 minutes later I'm looking at plastic fragments of what used to be my socket cover but yes, there was some coolant stain on the metal socket connections. I cleaned them off with a fancy toothpick brush and some 91% isopropyl alcohol. I also cleaned the CPU pins. Next I took that CPU and what was left of the plastic pieces of socket cover and just kind of mashed it all together hoping for the best. I stuck the aluminum piece of a wraith stealth (I took all the fans off and use these for other stuff) on there, connected the power cables, keyboard and monitor, and jump started it with a screwdriver and bam into the BIOS we go. I dodged another bullet I think. I need to go ahead and assemble the rest of it, but while it's still mostly apart I'm going to clean my radiators really good.

@BWG when you get a chance, adjust my points and multi. I turned on the Vega 64 just after I posted last night. I'm using it at 50% power to keep the house from heating up so much and it's still pumping out 800k ppd.

@BWG @Supercrumpet Moving to Vega 64 until the end of the month. Entering my ETF key on that card now. Next month I'd like to fold on GTX 750, which while it isn't nearly as good of an overclocker as my old HD 7850, it's very efficient and won't heat this room up running it 24/7.

I've got some 95% iso. I'll try tomorrow. I need to see if I can pull the plastic socket guard off without breaking it so I can see what's going on in there.

I've done that. I pulled the CPU out of the socket, and sure enough there was a slight stain on the corner of the socket and also on that corner of the CPU. I'll reevaluate tomorrow when I get some more time.

I pulled the loop apart. There was a slightly loose hose connection on the CPU block. I think water got into the socket because it just doesn't want to come back to life. I'm going to throw the air cooler back on the HD 7850 tomorrow and see if I can get it to fold on my second slot of my main rig. This ETF stuff is really an endurance challenge.