What's in your Croft???

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 6:45 pm

Robbie, if we are voting here, I'm taking the ram. Please mail my bottle of whiskey to...................................... LOL

Post by **Megacruncher** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:59 am

Buster, how can your Q6600s be lonely if there are now 2 of them?

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 4:16 am

Buster, how can your Q6600s be lonely if there are now 2 of them?

I guess it would depend on their sex. They are seperated by about 10 feet. One keeps the east side of the room warm and the other the west side. Actually they are not throwng off as much heat as I expected.

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 11:28 pm

hey loons hows it going? havent had update on pc yet but i am told it will be definaty next week if not this week so i dont know. i am getting very pissed of i want my thousand pound pc back!!!!

Post by **Megacruncher** » Wed Nov 07, 2007 11:39 pm

Nae sae bad!

Even without your wonder-machine our RAC is looking quite astronomical - below 100K only once in 10 days- & even yours is looking pretty respectable.

MacDitch · Post by **MacDitch** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 11:53 am

Just pulled this off the BoincStats Shout Box:

I think under 3 is a pot, 3-10 garden 11-15 field and above 16 farm.

where it seems to have been accepted as a suitable definition!

So own up - who are the farmers and who's just a pot head. :)

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:01 pm

Just a bit of an update.

Now, I have:

AMD Athlon 1800+
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
Intel Duo 1Ghz
and 3 semi-lonely Q6600 Quad's

I'm sharing the latest quad with my sister who uses it for her work at home, so I only get 2 cores during the day, but all 4 at night.

With 6 total machines, I guess I have a garden.

Post by **Snowdog** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 5:11 pm

New pc arriving at work next week. Will be another poxy dell but hopefully i'l be able to get past the firewall and have another dual processor up and running....the garden is blooming

MacDitch · Post by **MacDitch** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 6:06 pm

New pc arriving at work... ...hopefully i'l be able to get past the firewall...

You could always do the same as me. I have an installation at work running CPDN. I transfer the whole BOINC folder home every few months (it's an old machine!) to upload the results and get a new workunit before taking it back to work. I've been doing this since someone messed with the firewall and killed my access - it was easier than talking IT through finding the issue!

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 6:20 pm

Well, based on the boincstats definition, in the past I ran a farm, but downsized to a rather large garden!

Interestingly, my garden is now more productive than the farm was but takes less power to run and is easier to keep in trim.

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 9:47 pm

Interestingly, my garden is now more productive than the farm was but takes less power to run and is easier to keep in trim.

It's interesting how things progress. Years ago when I had 11 P4's and such running, I thought I really had something. I think 1 quad can do all the work of that farm. I'm having more fun this time. I decided last week to see if I could get all my projects over the 10K mark. Slowly, I'm whittling away at it. After that goal, look out above. No one is safe.

Post by **Megacruncher** » Fri Nov 09, 2007 10:46 pm

Go for it Buster! The more competition the better.

It really is astonishing how technology marches on. I must say that unless you are doing something like Boinc all this domestic computing power seems entirely unecessary. Fair enough games need lots of cycles but not many of them make very good use of multiple cores.
I don't have much time for games these days -and my kids would much rather use a dedicated games console- so my usual email and surfing activities could be accomodated quite happily on a 486 MHz 66 running Windows 95. This is a shocking waste of some superb technology - unless you're running Boinc! :)

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:56 am

I have all my personal stuff on my slowest machine. It handles it very well and I don't waste faster cycles. I never was one for the games. Seems like a waste of time to me, killing off all those aliens. I'd rather try to find them or help in some other way.

BTW, my ultimate hardware goal is to see if I can get a 10 unit blade server up and running on MS 2003 Server. I haven't got a clue how to do that, but I'm learning. If I not mistaken,each blade can have up to 8 Xeon cores. That would be interesting to see run. I bet the little disc on the electric meter would spin when that thing powers up.

Post by **Snowdog** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 6:19 am

Update on my garden.

New seed planted at work which has sprung an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz

Garden now includes

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) Duo CPU 3.00GHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2200+
AMD Sempron(tm) 2800+

At somepoint hopefully in the not to distant future I will manage to include a Rosebush(Quad) to this little allotment

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:37 pm

An Update.

I had another P4 smoke and die. I had.

AMD Athlon 1800+
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
Intel Duo 1Ghz
and 2 lonely Q6600 Quad's

The Intel Duo 1 Ghz died.

So now, I have:

AMD Athlon 1800+
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
and 4 lonely Q6600 Quad's

Post by **Megacruncher** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:21 pm

Nice replacement. 8) Hardly like for like but nice!
So, 4 Quads? They'll not be so lonely now!

Good work Buster. Prepare for lift-off!

Post by **Snowdog** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 5:25 pm

Little update* :)

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz*
Intel(R) Pentium(R) Duo CPU 3.00GHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2200+
AMD Sempron(tm) 2800+

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Thu Dec 13, 2007 9:36 am

Suppose I should do an update
3 x Q6600 intel quad core 2.4GHz
1x e6600 intel core 2 duo
1x Athlon X2 4600+ - down temporarily
1x Athlon X2 5600+
1x Athlon X2 6000+
Playstation 3
plus the old faithful Pentium 4 3.06Ghz Laptop

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:06 pm

Another update.

The Intel Duo 1 Ghz that died is now working again, but my AMD Athlon 1800+ took a hit from my grandson and a class of orange juice. I had the mobo out of the box cleaning it and he dropped the class on it. Put a crack in the board and drenched the whole board. Tried to get it to work, but got the pop pop pop of an electrical short. Not worth fixing. I don't hold out much hope for the AMD 1 Ghz either. Old age there.

So now, I have:

Intel Duo 1 Ghz
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
and 5 lonely Q6600 Quad's

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 9:51 pm

Added a Xmas present from my grandson.

So now, I have:

AMD Turion 64 X2 Tl-58 (It has even more problems with Vista)
Intel Duo 1 Ghz
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
and 5 lonely Q6600 Quad's

Post by **Megacruncher** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 12:56 am

5 Quads?!?

Holy Moley, thats more of a ranch than a farm!

BTW I've got an AMD Turion 64 X2 Tl-56, which seems very happy with vista.

My own current Tally is:
2 Laptops
AMD Turion 64 X2 Tl-56, Vista, QMC/WCG
Centrino Duo T5500 WXP CPDN/Rosetta
6 Desktops
Core Duo E6600 x 2 both W2K CPDN/QMC/Rosetta
Quad Q6600 x3, All Vista, 1 CPDN/QMC/Rosetta, 2 just Rosetta
Athlon 64 x2 4400+ Ubuntu, Rosetta
2 Temporarily Caseless
Athlon 64 x2 6000+, Ubuntu, Rosetta
Pentium D805 2.66, W2K, Rosetta

The QMC & CPDN work caches are being run down and soon my output will be 80% Rosetta and 20% WCG.

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:27 am

BTW I've got an AMD Turion 64 X2 Tl-56, which seems very happy with vista.

I'm actually thinking about buying Windows XP Pro (the 64 bit version) and installing it on everything. (I will make sure I have all pertinent drivers). Everything will have to wait temporarily because another medical procedure is in the works. Seems that my pacemaker is on recall because of lead defects. You don't know how much I hate operating rooms.

It's basically a small computer in my chest. While I'm there, I'll ask about running Boinc on it with the spare cycles.

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:29 am

Damn it, just bought another quad.

reckon I'll replace the 4600+ with it.

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:35 pm

Yeah. Another quad. Hopefully the croft will stay up when you go offshore again.

Post by **Reeltime** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:48 pm

Silly question but what are the minimum specs for running a quad in terms of motherboard, RAM etc?

And where is the cheapest place o buy such stuff

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:27 pm

Well I've just paid Â£280 delivered for an Asus Mobo, Q6600 and 4Gb of Ram.
On top of that assuming you are building from scratch you'll need a decent case with a good PSU reckon Â£35 upwards, a HD which you can get a Sata drive from again Â£35 up graphics card PCI-E from say Â£50 for a basic one then obviously an operating system, you can pick up either XP or Vista from in the region of Â£50 on Ebay.
If you do go the Ebay route double check that the supplier doesn't add VAT after you have purchased the item, most of the ebay sellers of PC equipment do this so check the small print before you bid.
Alternatively I think PC world still do a full Acer system with monitor for about Â£6-700.

Post by **FlyingfocRS** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:11 pm

4 x Q6600 intel quad core 2.4GHz

1x e6600 intel core 2 duo
1x Athlon X2 5600+
1x Athlon X2 6000+
Playstation 3
plus the old faithful Pentium 4 3.06Ghz Laptop

Post by **ianmbaker2** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:43 pm

And I thought I was doing well with 1 x Q6600 o/c to 3.0Ghz.
Just waiting on my 2nd replacement Asus P5K-e WiFi mother board after another unsuccessful attempt at upgrading the BIOS so that it will see my memory as 1066 rather than 800.
So back to slow crunching on my AMD notebook just to keep a few units coming in.

Post by **Andrew** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:50 pm

I've got a T2300, T7200 and a Pentium 4 3GHz that will be constant workhorses.
Plus the following wont have 100% up time and may have to disappear for a couple of weeks at a time every few months, but they'll be back before too long

E2180
E6300
E6550
T7250
2x T5600
E2180
U7600
T7700
T2400
Xeon 5140

Most of them wont be online all the time so I'm going to have to keep remembering to hook them up every few days to get the crunched data up.

Nightlord · Post by **Nightlord** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 8:38 pm

Hmmmm, seems we have a new crofter in our midst!

Welcome aboard andrewspatterson! A quick tip: once things have stabilised with your projects, slowly increase the cache size, so you can cover gaps between upload.

Enjoy, and don't worry about the power bills!

Post by **Andrew** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 8:45 pm

I do hope so

I've got most of them set to a 5 day cache I think.
Got a couple of questions but I'll pop them in another thread to keep this one clean

About 2/3 of the machines are laptops which is good for the power at least :)

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 1:15 am

Okay, time to update my list.

All my P4's have died. My sister took her Quad to work. I added a few replacements in Mar & Apr.

The croft.
7 Q6600 Intel Quads.
1 Q9500 AMD Phenom Quad.
AMD Turion 64 X2 Tl-58 Intel Duo 1.9 Ghz laptop
Toshiba T8100 2.10 Ghz Duo laptop

1 Intel Quad, the AMD Quad and the Toshiba all run Vista 64 bit

Everything else runs Vista 32 bit (until more projects release a 64 bit app)
The Turion gets 64 bit next.

Unless I buy a new house (thinking about it very hard), my croft is complete.

Running current projects, it should be about 32K RAC.

Post by **Snowdog** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 7:21 am

I was wondering who had the Phenom Quad how does it perform Buster

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 4:54 pm

I was wondering who had the Phenom Quad how does it perform Buster

I just finished loading x64 on a Q6600 and a Phenom. I decided to run Riesel Sieve on both. I know Riesel Sieve better than most projects.

On the Q6600, w/u's take 40:18. On the Phenom they take 48:15. Those are averages over hundreds of w/u's I'm guessing that the difference is the FSB. On the Q6600 I have 1000fsb and on the Phenom its only 800.
The Phenom has 4gb Ram and the Q6600 has only 3gb.

I was very surprised but the Q6600 blew the chips off the Phenom. The Phenom is still fast but I think its bus speeds and cache sizes hurts it's performance. Hope this helps.

BTW, for those x64 fans, after experimenting for about a week with Vista X64, I found that the wu's run the fastest when the page file size (virtual memory) is set to ZERO. These w/u's are about 7% faster that way. You need at least 2gb, but it is a screamer. I didn't try that on an X32 machine yet.

Post by **Snowdog** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 6:49 pm

Very interesting Buster I think i will wait and see what new comes from AMD at the turn of Summer. I actually thought the Phenom would kick some serious butt over its intel equivalent...maybe not

Post by **Buster Gunn** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 8:27 pm

I actually thought the Phenom would kick some serious butt over its intel equivalent...maybe not

Thats what I thought also. Maybe its just an inferior mobo it's mounted to. I played with it for 2 days but couldn.t get it faster. I finally ran CPUZ on both machines and the cache sizes and FSB were a dead giveaway.

FOR NOW, Q6600 is the champ.

BTW, I heard rumors that a double quad is in the works. 8 cores and your very own HUGE block of dry ice. :) :)

Post by **Snowdog** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 8:51 pm

BTW, I heard rumors that a double quad is in the works. 8 cores and your very own HUGE block of dry ice. :) :)

Thats what i was waiting for

darkmast2 · Post by **darkmast2** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:09 pm

Isn't the AMD quad a true quad tho ? Where as the Intel one is a mash of 2 duals ?

Post by **Megacruncher** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:36 pm

The double quad is already here as the Mac Pro! http://www.apple.com/macpro/ It's pricey, you pay for the branding & styling as well as the CPUs, but attractive if you want a farm in a single box.

As regards the Phenom I've got a 9600. Maybe it just feels ill at ease in the company of so many quads, but it's been a little disappointing. At best it's 75% as productive as the quads. It's no cheaper either.

Post by **Snowdog** » Wed Apr 23, 2008 6:50 pm

Another update *

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) Duo CPU 3.00GHz
Intel(R) Pentium(R) Duo CPU 3.00GHz*
Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.60GHz*
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2200+
AMD Sempron(tm) 2800+

Post by **Megacruncher** » Thu Apr 24, 2008 12:12 am

Okay here's my current line-up.

Intel Quad Core Q6600 #1
Intel Quad Core Q6600 #2
Intel Quad Core Q6600 #3
Intel Quad Core Q6600 #4
Intel Core Duo E6600 #1
Intel Core Duo E6600 #2
AMD Quad Core Phenom 9600
AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (laptop)
Intel Core(tm)2 CPU T5500 (laptop)
Intel(R) Core(tm)2 CPU 6300 (work machine)

Which I make to be 30 cores in total ! Like, well awesome, dudes! 8) 8)