Help required! Cuda on new system crashes!

[Gizbar]

Help required please. I'm slowly tearing out what little hair I have left as I can't get Cuda working properly on my new Win 7 system.

I have:- Asus M4A79T deluxe, 4Gb corsair DDR3 ram, AMD955 clocked up to 3.6Ghz at stock voltage, and a 9800GTX+ on Win7-64 bit release candidate, with Lunatics v0.1.

I installed a new GTX260 (a Gigabyte super overclock 896Mb, running at  680Mhz core, 1500Mhz shaders, and 2500Mhz ram). Gigabyte say they cherry-pick the GPU's to run at this speed. I only got it because the EVGA I ordered went out of stock and they agreed to do this one at the same price. It seemed to be working fine, tried a couple of benchmarks but don't have much to hand, until I tried to update to Win7-64 bit Home premium full version, and Lunatics v0.2 64bit.

Started off with a complete blank hdd, and installed all my stuff. Tried to save all my work, as discussed on Seti forum, and thought I'd succeeded. Installed Boinc 6.6.41, which I know now seems to be a bit flaky so uninstalled and put 6.6.38 on there. Installed Lunatic v0.2 and it started processing. Also running Nvidia 191.07, and cuda 2.3 dlls

The problem comes when it tries to hand over one Cuda to another. It finishes one unit, and then freezes the screen completely when trying to take up another. The mouse will move for a while, but none of the buttons on windows will work and then the mouse freezes too. It doesn't fail like this on every work unit, but I can't trust it to leave it be anymore. I proved the theory about the wu handover by following it on SysInternals processxp. I've even used EVGA precision to underclock the card slightly, but it doesn't stop it freezing up.

Sorry for the essay, but I'm trying to give as much information as possible...

Any ideas?

regards, Gizbar.

[Raistmer]

Most useful info still missed - link to your host!

[Gizbar]

Ok, I can do that, it is host number 5000538.

But I don't know how I can provide you any details of the ones that are failing. (but see below for one example!)

What seems to be happening is when they fail, they go back to the last checkpoint after rebooting, but Boinc is not finishing the work unit off, it's starting a new one from the cache.

One of the failing workunits is this one:-  02se09ab.28065.22971.12.10.166_1 - got to 03:04 and 26.551%

Hope that helps a bit more.

It was running for a few months on Win7-64bit with the 9800GTX+ on Lunatics v0.1

regards, Gizbar.

[Raistmer]

If you wanna people help you why not easy their work and provide complete URL to host?

[Gizbar]

Ok, here it is.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5000538

Hope that helps.

Have now tried disabling aero, but no joy.

Running out of ideas because it doesn't seem to be the card. Just had a play with Stalker: Clear Sky just to see if it would crash, but never in the game.

regards, Gizbar.

[Richard Haselgrove]

I have:- Asus M4A79T deluxe, 4Gb corsair DDR3 ram, AMD955 clocked up to 3.6Ghz at stock voltage, and a 9800GTX+ on Win7-64 bit release candidate, with Lunatics v0.1.

I installed a new GTX260 (a Gigabyte super overclock 896Mb, running at  680Mhz core, 1500Mhz shaders, and 2500Mhz ram).

regards, Gizbar.

You don't mention your power supply. Your new GPU will draw significantly more power than the old one - could that be the problem?

[Gizbar]

Hi Richard, thanks for the reply.

I don't think so. I have a Corsair 620w power supply, and I've used a power supply guide at http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp which is telling me I should be drawing no more than about 80% of it's rating.

I've done some more testing today with 3dmark06 and used GPU-Z to log the temperatures too. It hasn't crashed once and hasn't been over 74c. While running the Cuda app, the temperature was averaging 72c, which I don't think is too excessive for the GTX260 IIRC. CPU on it's own is running fine, ran 4 instances of Prime95 to test it, never got above 51-52c.

It only seems to have a problem switching from one Cuda wu to the next, AFAICT. This leaves the wu partially done, as the crash makes it go back to the last save point in the wu, which could be as little as 3%. That doesn't bother me in itself, but it does bother me that it doesn't restart that wu, and goes onto another instead. I now have several sitting like this.

I just don't know why. I'll get a new PSU if I have to, but nothing else seems to be failing, and I thought that running the benchmark at top quality for an hour or more would stress the component just as much. Maybe it's because they're all running together? I'll try that now. My other system only has a 500w OCZ power supply in it, and is running flawlessly with the 9800GTX+ in it.

regards, Gizbar.

[efmer (fred)]

Another thing you should check. If the motherboard can handle the current of your card from the bus. This is also an significant amount of current.
I have a board that crashed while starting a WU but sometimes it ran for a day or so.
The power supply was large enough, but the regulator on the board was not up to the task.

[Gizbar]

Thanks Fred. Not sure how to check that one out, but the board is only a few months old and Asus make a big thing about the no. of phases they have and the stable supply to everything on it. There are no other cards running on any bus apart from that one. I'm going to do a few more tests with 3dmark vantage and then possibly try the non-vlarkill version of the cuda app, to see if that makes a difference. I've not had to sort a problem like this before with Seti, normally any problems are my own doing, and I've had to pay the price for doing it, and get help sorting it out, normally from the Seti boards.

regards, Gizbar.

[efmer (fred)]

You only tried this on Win 7 X64? I don't think the drivers are quite finished. I still wait for a driver that runs my 2 GTX 295 without crashing all the CUDA tasks. And making my system feel like a 386 systems from way way back.
The same system works just fine on XP 64.
And you may have a defective card, I had more than 100% defects.. before I got some stable cards.

[Gizbar]

It's only a couple of days ago that I installed Win7-64 Home premium, but I've tried so much since then. I think I had the card running on Win7-64 RC, but I'm not 100% sure.

Don't think the card is defective, is there any other GPU test I can try? Something a bit more scientific?

I've just had 3dmark06 demo running with 4 Prime95 tasks running in the background and there were no crashes after 3 or 4 loops. The only problem I had was Prime95 didn't exit cleanly and stopped working as I tried to exit. I'm just about to try the V12 non-Vlarkill app and see what happens then.

Never used XP64 only 32bit. I may try WinXP again after this, if the non-Vlarkill app doesn't work. If it does, I'll try that for a few days, and use reschedule 1.9 to force Vlar to CPU.

The only other thing I can think of is that the PSU can't cope, as Richard suggested. I don't think so, but I'm not sure how I can log the voltages while processing to test it. I have Everest v5, but I don't know if voltages can be logged through it.

Don't want to give up on Win7 easily though, as I've found it pretty good and stable so far.

regards, Gizbar.

[Gizbar]

New update:- Reinstalled Windows XPPro-32 bit and Lunatics with Boinc 6.6.38, and Nvidia 191.07 with cuda 2.3 dll's.

Running GPU tests now to see if that solve problem.

If it does, I'll be cheesed off after paying for the Win7 version, especially after it all seemed to be working on Win7-64 bit RC.

I'll keep you all posted...

regards, Gizbar.


 P.S. Thanx to all who have chipped in with ideas and suggestions. It really is appreciated.

G.

[Gizbar]

New new update! (Does that make any sense?)

Been running without any crashes so far (only 1/2 an hour though, so far), and all seems to be well.

Using GPU-Z to log temps, not above 75c, and SysInternals process explorer to see what's happening (although I can't find a log option for that).

What I have noticed though, is that the cuda wu's are randomly stopping, and starting another one. I actually missed it stop, then when looked again it had stopped one at approx 76% and had started another.

Then I actually saw it stop the current one at about 35%, and then go back to the previous one and finish it successfully.

I am now confused even more!

Any ideas on what is happening?

All on host number http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5000538I have virtually nothing on this machine as I'm trying to prove that it seems to be either the 64bit version of lunatics that is causing the problem or the shift to Win7-64. Maybe I could try the 32bit version of Lunatics on the 64bit system?

regards, Gizbar.

[efmer (fred)]

New new update! (Does that make any sense?)

Been running without any crashes so far (only 1/2 an hour though, so far), and all seems to be well.

Using GPU-Z to log temps, not above 75c, and SysInternals process explorer to see what's happening (although I can't find a log option for that).

What I have noticed though, is that the cuda wu's are randomly stopping, and starting another one. I actually missed it stop, then when looked again it had stopped one at approx 76% and had started another.

Then I actually saw it stop the current one at about 35%, and then go back to the previous one and finish it successfully.

I am now confused even more!

Any ideas on what is happening?

All on host number http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5000538I have virtually nothing on this machine as I'm trying to prove that it seems to be either the 64bit version of lunatics that is causing the problem or the shift to Win7-64. Maybe I could try the 32bit version of Lunatics on the 64bit system?

regards, Gizbar.

The stopping is quit normal but you need at least BOINC 6.6.38.
And it doesn't matter if the system is 32 of 64 bit.
If the WU finish and are validated properly everything is fine. Sometimes you don't want to know why BOINC is stopping WU it's just how the scheduler works.
I've seen dozens of them at times.

[Gizbar]

Thanks for the info, Fred.

I'm just happy at the moment that it's running successfully without crashing. Never noticed it swapping wu before that's all. If it's normal behaviour I can live with it. My RAC is taking a dive with all this mucking around going on, but I need to find out what is going on.

As posted earlier I went back to version 6.6.38 from version 6.6.41, which I notice has now been pulled from Boinc downloads for Windows systems. Have you tried the 6.10.17 version yet?

Want to get it running properly before messing with another new Boinc version.

regards, Gizbar.