Folding Chit-Chat

[Tattysnuc]

Yeah, was a good one. Lovely weather.



I would be happy with 4.6 on a sandy bridge. I'm still trying to work out my upgrade path at the moment and how to upgrade/increase my storage .

Call me petty, but I can get into Windows and run superPI at 5.0 Ghz. I can even open Firefox and browse the web and word process.

Can;t fold though Crashes after between 30mins and 14 hours. I'm scared of damaging the CPU as I had 1.45 v going through it, and I didn;t feel comfortable going above that even though the temps are barely touching 70 after several hours folding. Had a play, but now I'm getting the main server back up and going.

So far it's ok, but I can;t boot to Windows (old install prior to new hard drive installs +2TB) I've moved the system drive onto a different port, which is a different controller chip instead of Intels, so I reckon that'll need a re-install. Just downloading an Ubuntu live disk to test my theory....

[Englander]

Back from Wales so I'm back in the fold again with my reliable little GTX 460

[Tattysnuc]

Server is back online and folding at stock speeds.

I need some time to fix the PPD because right now it's WAY too low (25k ppd - Core i7 980x @3.46Ghz/12threads/GTX 295 @660 core).

I''m going to leave it running overnight to ensure it's prime stable (or the folding equivilent) and then when back from sorting stuff I'll have a go at getting a few more pts from it.

Sandybridge board has reset on me once since dropping the clocks to 4.6, while I was having tea, so don;t thing I'll be relying on this board for a whole lot. great for gaming which is primarily why I bought it.

Wish I could find out why it reset though. No bsod file so unless I catch it in the process, there's no chance.

[Queelis]

After reading this review I've decided I will most probably not upgrade my CPU to a 6-core. The fact that a dual-core hyper-threaded Core i3 can out-muscle a full-blown X4 even in multi-threaded applications made me cringe. The Phenoms are really showing their age.

Will probably just hold on to this system until it's not usable anymore.

[Rob_B]

But think of the e-peen

I'm loving my X6 but to be frank would have been happy with an X4, folding while playing Crysis 2 is nice though & I'm not sure 4 cores/threads would have been able to do that very well.

I'm not as impressed as I'd imagined with folding performance (@3.3Ghz) I'd have gone core i3/5 but a CPU only upgrade was the cheaper option, it depends when you plan to upgrade your mobo I guess.

[Queelis]

But think off the e-peen

I'm loving my X6 but to be frank would have been happy with an X4, folding while playing Crysis 2 is nice though & I'm not sure 4 cores/threads would have been able to do that very well.

I'm not as impressed as I'd imagined with folding performance (@3.3Ghz) I'd have gone core i3/5 but a CPU only upgrade was the cheaper option, it depends when you plan to upgrade your mobo I guess.

I think I will only upgrade when my GPU is too slow to run anything new I'd really want to play (runs Portal 2 easily), it was a bargain 2 years ago, and it still goes - don't see anything similar on the market today for the price; and when an X4 is too slow to feed the would-be-new GPU. So that's what, at least one more year, maybe two?

By then, gods know what we will have.

[Rob_B]

If the most demanding game you want to play is Portal 2 then you'll be ok for a while

I'm still waiting for my 212-plus to arrive, will try to bump this upto around 3.6Ghz then see how that affects my PPD.

[Queelis]

Well, there's Fallout: New Vegas, but I just don't have the time, since there's also Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (which also runs fine, by the way).

The only upgrade I'm going to do when I'm back from the US is a huge cooler (Mugen 2 or 3 (depending on which way the fan will blow in the 3; maybe Ninja 3 or Zalman CNPS10X Quiet) and undervolting system fans to 7V, so I'd have complete silence at load. Silence is bliss

[Golden Dragoon]

I'm not as impressed as I'd imagined with folding performance (@3.3Ghz) I'd have gone core i3/5 but a CPU only upgrade was the cheaper option, it depends when you plan to upgrade your mobo I guess.

My Athlon 2 @ 3.2 is a bit faster than my Q6600 @ 3.3 on some work units, and slightly slower in others, even running it at 3.6 the athlon still just beats it in some units, I assume it is the fact that although I have 6gb of ddr2 in my main machine, there is a built in memory controller and 2gb of much faster ddr3 in the athlon machine.

Not sure how the L3 in phenoms would affect it, but it seems to me that in the real world the K10 cores are just about as fast as the core2 at the same sort of speeds.

[Rob_B]

I'm running 6GB of DDR2 with this on an AM2+ board, I wonder what an upgrade to DDR3 would do. What sort of effect does RAM speed have on PPD?

[Queelis]

If I had to guess, I'd say negligible.

[Golden Dragoon]

I can't compare ddr2 v. 3 on my athlon as I don't have a moobo that takes ddr2, but at it's stock 3.2ghz with DDR3 1333@ 7-7-8 (not tweaked timings yet) it will beat my 3.3ghz q6600 by several seconds per frame, and that is running it's mem at 840mhz and 5-6-6..

It would seem that the extra memory speed for an athlon would provide a slight benefit on smaller units, but a bigger benefit to the larger ones,
#but that may just be me looking at things too simply, as there are many differences between the core2 and K10 architecture that could be the cause rather than the memory subsystem so I can't compare them exactly.

p.s. please excuse any gramatical or spelling errors, I am well passed it now,, not been out drinking in ages and it has caught me right up.

[Tattysnuc]

...snip...
p.s. please excuse any gramatical or spelling errors, I am well passed it now,, not been out drinking in ages and it has caught me right up.

he he! Amateur!

Who said folding can't be fun eh!

Update... my rebuilt server (you're probably all sick of hearing about the bloody thing!) crashed yesterday while I was out becoming a godfather/wetting the hair of my god-daughter. Didn;t even notice it this morning until the machine started making some ratehr alarming noises. I've rebooted and all seems fine, so I'm going to leave it on for another 24 hours, then it get's powered down for a couple of weeks while we have some work done. No folding for me for a couple of weeks while the works going on on the house, then we're on holiday!

Once I'm back I'll get back up to the 100k ppd I was on.

[1stRaven]

ouch, thats going to make a dent in the ppd for us.

I am running a couple of additional servers at the moment but expected to have to drop two of those off next week.....

A bit of a lean time for hexus coming up I think.

[Champman99]

Hi all,

One day I suddenly stopped folding for no apparent reason. I really want to start it up again but it's just been so damn hot here on the south coast and my Study where most of the PC hardware is is non-air conditioned and south facing.

The only PC that is on 24/7 at the moment is my Amahi/Fedora server, it's got an X2 250 in it which could probably deliver 1500 or so PPD on the SMP if memory serves but I'm reluctant to do anything to my server which obviously contains so much precious precious data and I think I'd rather leave it idling.

Last time I was into folding I think I had an 8800GT and X2 in a dedicated folding machine, the Core 2 in my main gaming rig, and a single CPU client on the server. Now the hardware situation has rather changed though. The dedicated folding rig has had to be pulled apart for spares. The main PC has a new 2500K in it, and the Core2Duo motherboard / CPU has been sitting around and may not be operational.

I think if I was to start again then right now it would just be the CPU in my main machine, the 2500K. I understand that BigAdv is probably the best way to go on this from a PPD perspective, but I'd worry with the amount I use the cores for other stuff that I'd end up missing deadlines and get diddly squat.

Anyway good to see how much folding has come on @ Hexus since I was last involved!

[Terbinator]

You can't run Bigadv on the 2500K as the BA client support CPU's with a minimum of 8 cores/threads only. However, the 2500K will deliver a healthy amount of points with the normal SMP client.