Posts Tagged CUDA
On the subject of Bitcoin and creating free Money
I don’t want this blog entry to be about explaining Bitcoin (BTC), so I’ll point you folks looking for more information over to Wikipedia where they have a very in-depth article on the topic. What I will talk about in this post is a story of my involvement in the whole Bitcoin shenanigans that are happening on the net and where I think I’ll go with, or leave it.
In early June of this year I caught wind of Bitcoin really taking off through a friend who had started experimenting with solo mining using his CPU. At the time, I had thought nothing much of it and brushed it off as just another distributed project along the lines of SETI@Home or Folding@Home.
Over the course of a week or two, through bloggers and twitter feeds the whispers in the wind of Bitcoin had turned into a full on fog horn! Bitcoin was a modern day gold rush and if you weren’t in on it, you were missing out! The numbers at the time were ridiculous and it sounded like you’d be stupid not to get in on it. Earnings for miners being upwards of $2000 per month, people investing thousands of dollars in new hardware and obviously the news media coverage of the less glamorous use of Bitcoin… that of the drug trade through the Silk Road.
I didn’t want to be the last person to the party, so I jumped in.
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Problems with nVidia cooling over long term?
Posted by eric in Hardware, Miscellaneous, Windows Vista on June 15, 2009
I’m an avid SETI@home cruncher have been for years. My bragging note is that I recently passed 3,000,000 credits on SETI@home and part of that is thanks to the SETI@home CUDA enabled client they released which enables GPU crunching of SETI@home work units!
I’m currently running the CUDA client on two machines that have video cards that support the CUDA API. My home GeForce 8800GTX and my work Quadro FX 4600. From what I’ve read in specs and reviews, they’re basically the same card. So although this issue isn’t TECHNICALLY apples to apples, there might be a connection.
I noticed after a month or so of running the CUDA client on my home GeForce 8800GTX, my Vista machine started to become unstable. Blue Screening (BSOD) or rebooting randomly. It struck me as odd because I had not changed anything and for the most part, the system had just been sitting idle crunching work units.
After some basic trouble shooting I was able to determine that the instability was due to my video card overheating! This struck me as strange, because I know nVidia uses variable speed fans on the 8800GTX, so you’d think that if the system was reaching an unsafe operating level, that the fan would kick on, right? Wrong.
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