I have trouble enabling GPU only via boinc manager.
It appears that by setting CPU resources to 1%, Boinc will start a GPU task, and a CPU task.
Setting it to 0%, is the same as 100%.
What I wanted to address is if Boinc manager could be set to use 0% CPU, meaning, do only GPU projects.

GPU + CPU projects overheats my mobile device, and I have no easy way to enable GPU only tasks for testing.

To set CPU to 0% should be the most logical step to GPU only crunching (only use the CPU necessary to feed a GPU task, but not starting any additional CPU-only tasks.).

The Manager might be the control interface, but it's the client which actually decides what to run.

Similarly, for a GPU task, the control interface runs on the CPU, but despatches the heavy work (in tiny fragments) to the GPU.

The developers decided on a purist approach: even GPU tasks do actually require the CPU to run, so 'GPU only' is an invalid specification.

Out in the real world, we know what you mean, and many of us would like to be able to do what you want. In the meantime: don't accept new tasks from CPU-only projects, and switch off CPU jobs on the project website, where projects have both CPU and GPU applications.

Usage of hardware options is a project preference, so go to the Project Preferences page and uncheck the use of the CPU. Any CPU work still in cache will have to run or be aborted though.

The "Use at most N% of the CPUs" is for how many cores you want to use, not for disabling the use of the CPU.
So, for example at Seti@Home: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/prefs.php?subset=project, on the right venue, edit preferences and uncheck "Use CPU". Then save preferences.

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Going on the website to configure is not a viable option in my case, since I have PCs under the same username, that need different configurations.
Which is why I wrote that it's not an easy thing. It's possible to configure every pc for every project, but for 10+ pcs, cellphones, tablets, and servers, it's a job not of several hours, but of several days!
It's really not a viable option.
The Manager (/cient) needs to have options to configure a PC directly (not dependent on general remote settings shared by multi-PCs).

Going on the website to configure is not a viable option in my case, since I have PCs under the same username, that need different configurations.

I can see that that is an issue with several devices. I have never gone above 4 devices at once and never above 3 on any one project which allows it to be done by giving each a separate location, Home, Work and School being the options for setting up on the project websites.

Yeah, but you got to admit that this whole thing is pretty much a mishmash of settings spread out everywhere.
I would say that website settings are general settings, eg:
when I want a certain project to send me CPU only jobs, to have all my connected devices automatically apply these settings is pretty reasonable.

However, there still needs to be a manual override on the manager/client, to, whenever changed in the client, request work outside of custom profile settings.

Ideally a manager/client local configuration could centralize settings for most projects. (eg: on this machine I want to run CPU or GPU only; or I want to disable AMD GPUs or NVIDIA for all projects).

I prefer working from the idea that the controls are centralized to the software, rather than remote.
Remote settings mostly work if you have multiple devices that are relatively identical (meaning, all have Nvidia or ATI GPUs, or all run CPU jobs), and can work on the same settings (eg: do Seti on all my devices).

I prefer working from the idea that the controls are centralized to the software, rather than remote.
Remote settings mostly work if you have multiple devices that are relatively identical (meaning, all have Nvidia or ATI GPUs, or all run CPU jobs), and can work on the same settings (eg: do Seti on all my devices).

There are two things for that. One is BOINCtasks and the other is an account manager.

BOINC supports a few different AM’s such as BAM and GridRepublic where you can standardise your settings across projects. See https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Account_managers

BOINCtasks is good for managing a fleet of machines. See https://efmer.com/

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MarkJ

Yes, but BAM has other issues.
1- I can't disable projects on one PC, when they are locked by BAM
2- The features BAM offers, are all copied to each device using the same BAM username.

This would force me to install BAM only on a few devices, and the others (like where I don't need to run those projects) I'd have to run without BAM and configure them manually.

I think BAM and Boinc are designed for 1 to a few identical devices at most per user.
They're not really optimized for common household item combinations like eg:
a- The desktop PC with fast CPU and GPU (crunch on GPU or both)
b- The tablet with just CPU
c- The media player with Android 9 (crunch only ARM projects)
d- The small form factor pc that overheats when iGPU is used in combination with CPU for prolonged times, and needs different settings from the desktop pc
e- The old cellphone that can runs Android 4, and can only run different projects than the android 9 media player.

The only solution is to either configure each device as 'home', 'work', ... which is A LOT of work (especially for like 8+ projects per device), or use a different user name, which takes even more work to do, or configure each device manually, without BAM (which can't be done, without affecting the project settings of the other devices).

It seems like I can set my CPU usage to 1 or 2%, and CPU usage time to 1%,
This doesn't appear to affect GPU performance, and keeps the CPU mostly idle (1% of the time crunching, at 1% of it's performance).

Actually, I ended up disabling CPU crunching in each project's website; and found a project that can utilize CPU only jobs.
That way all my GPUs and CPU threads are busy.
I prefer not to cruch CPU tasks on projects that have GPU tasks available.

You can also easily use location settings to allow different computers on the same project under the same user account to have different settings. Just set different computers to different locations.