THE PCS AND GPUs

I run 2 x Intel Quads, one with an ATI HD5970 on board, the other with an HD5850. Both crunchers run Win XP SP3 32bit, and the ATI driver is 11.3 with APP, etc.

BROADBAND TECHNOLOGY

This is 2 way satellite @ 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up.

GPU CRUNCH TIMES

The HD5850 crunches in between 2150 secs and 2350 secs, and the HD5970 takes between 965 secs and 1060 seconds.

OTHER CPU PROJECTS RUN AT THE SAME TIME AS MOO!

On the Quad CPUs I run -

PrimeGrid (3 CPUs) on the PC with the HD5850. At the same time I run 2 non-CPU intensive (NCI) projects (FreeHAl x 4 NCI clients and 1 client of WUProp). I have a similar set up for the PC with the HD5970, but I limit PrimeGrid to 2 CPUs.

THE LOSS OF BROADBAND & OBSERVED RESULT.

I lost the 2 way satellite broadband for about 5 hours this morning. As a result the NCI work for FreeHAL and WUProp ran out - no cache, and crunched 1 at a time. But, the caches for Moo! and PrimeGrid allowed the CPUs and GPUs to crunch on. Not Internet access

RESULT

After the NCI WUs projects ran to completion I was left with Moo! running on the two GPUs and PrimeGrid running on the CPUs. But, the GPU crunch times on both GPUs (2 separate PCs) fell significantly.

For the HD5850 the normal crunchtime of ~2,200 seconds [b]fell to between 1,417 and 1,864 seconds. Normal credit was given. NOTE: The CPU support time seemed to be normal.

The HD5970 did the same, and the average crunch time fell from 1,050 seconds to between 415 and 701 seconds. NOTE: Again the CPU support times seemed normal.


Has anyone seen this happen elsewhere?

I must say I am tempted to suspend net access in BM to see if itis reproducible!

I'd guess the performance differences you observe are not so much related to not having internet access, as to the changed workload of the system by projects running out of work.
Try playing with (temporarily) disabling some cpu projects to see what it does.

Also try changing the [processor-usage] priority from 4 to 9 in dnetc-1.00.ini
Maybe you can also update your ati drivers (11.10 is newest atm).