Folding@Home Weekly Team News - 2nd November 2006

[SiriusB]

I suppose I could wait for Kentsfield but I suspect that will be longer than it seems. Look at Conroe, it has been out since around July and there are still issues with Conroe/RAM/Mobo combinations.

Not sure I wanna have to wait while they arse about getting Kentsfield to work. Besides, I suspect most high end motherboards will support Kentsfield with a BIOS upgrade so it may simply be a case of buying a new CPU down the line.

Having said all that trying to keep in step with the PC industry is bloody expensive work. An E6600 overclocked to [hopefully] 3.5GHz or above will be a mighty thing indeed.

SiriusB

 

[MGP]

Excellent news once again Mr Lotsanumbers The team moves inexoribly towards a six figure PPD. An team stomps are almost inevitable for next week. Stunning

Personally, I'm amazed at my borg's output. Didn't think 20K was remotely possible. I've since spotted that a couple of borgs had died, and the server still crashed over weekend so no new WUs get downloaded promptly. Maybe 25k is achievable

 

[SiriusB]

SiriusB

 

[MGP]

SiriusB

You've got around four days until your brief moment of enjoyment:

Most of the borgs are operated by the office secretaries

 

[Saetia]

^_^

 

[Joe42]

I suppose I could wait for Kentsfield but I suspect that will be longer than it seems. Look at Conroe, it has been out since around July and there are still issues with Conroe/RAM/Mobo combinations.

Not sure I wanna have to wait while they arse about getting Kentsfield to work. Besides, I suspect most high end motherboards will support Kentsfield with a BIOS upgrade so it may simply be a case of buying a new CPU down the line.

Having said all that trying to keep in step with the PC industry is bloody expensive work. An E6600 overclocked to [hopefully] 3.5GHz or above will be a mighty thing indeed.

SiriusB

Yes i hope the ridiculous vreg compatibility issues that plagued conroe don't cause problems for kentsfield as well. Its quite possible that the same thing will happen again being a higher power chip, although i hope not.
If you did get conroe now and upgrade later you might find that K8L makes an appearance and becomes a much more desirable option, or you would end up with a spare core 2 duo, and if you're anything like me all your machines are 939 so that would be no use to me for anything.

Keeping in step isn't such a problem, its this big speed jump, price war and then speed war caused by conroe thats causing me problems. Don't get me wrong, its been fantastic for the industry and for consumers but not for me, at least not yet. I'm in the position of having spent lots of money on a system only to see it depreciate by a massive amount and become second rate.

Which reminds me, while i'm moaning i must say i've got to be the unluckiest person there is for getting duff cpus which won't clock.
Got a 3200+ winchester which were almost all great clockers and its not happy above 2.4 which is a 400mhz increase. And of course the opty, the 'highly overclockable' cpu i spent loads of money on which only does 2.5 up from 2.2 which is lower than anyone elses.

 

[SiriusB]

That's another reason I don't really want to wait for Kentsfield... just means waiting longer, spending more money and facing the possibility of it getting owned by AMDs next effort.

At least with a Conroe I know I have a good year or so before I am faced with any problems. I was pretty unlucky in getting my current rig when I did because pretty much straight after I got it Conroe's release was imminent. Nothing I could do cos I needed a new rig ASAP.

To be honest though I think AMD and Intel need to slow down. Unlike in the past these new CPUs are just bursting with power and the only way to push them is by running lots and lots of applications at once, which most people don't need to do. There is going to be a point where only the very richest of people will be able to afford the brand new sextuple-core wonder chip.

SiriusB

 

[joeyjojo]

Sirius - give your brother as much kit as possible then sell anything thats left over. Keeps the 4400 folding and your brother happy, but gets a bit of extra cash from the sales.

 

[shadowscotland]

Thanks for the news rich, some might nice figures in thoses lists

8 . lemonman - 14,319
9 . bam0 - 14,299

Got 'im And just as well top ten is getting crowded with n00bie

Great week for me \o/
For once been getting good WU's continually- must have my farm setup opposite to stan and SB as when ever they are storming ahead I'm stuck with dud WU and when I'm flying they get dud's.

Or could just be on dud WU quantity better that quality.

anyway's, good work team - and it's good to see single crunchers making significate head way into top 50 dumpers. Just goes to show you don't need a farm to make a differance.

In other news - seriously considering getting a C2D if there a board that will run my ballistix ram (can't really afford new cpu/mobo & ram)

 

[Plasmoid]

Not sure why my once 1000 pp week overclocked 3000+ is struggling to get 250 per week now... i blame you damn x1900 owners, roll on x1800 client!

 

[VeNT]

Not sure why my once 1000 pp week overclocked 3000+ is struggling to get 250 per week now... i blame you damn x1900 owners, roll on x1800 client!

bad WUs recently!
I've been getting nothing but bad PPD all this week

 

[Joe42]

That's another reason I don't really want to wait for Kentsfield... just means waiting longer, spending more money and facing the possibility of it getting owned by AMDs next effort.

At least with a Conroe I know I have a good year or so before I am faced with any problems. I was pretty unlucky in getting my current rig when I did because pretty much straight after I got it Conroe's release was imminent. Nothing I could do cos I needed a new rig ASAP.

To be honest though I think AMD and Intel need to slow down. Unlike in the past these new CPUs are just bursting with power and the only way to push them is by running lots and lots of applications at once, which most people don't need to do. There is going to be a point where only the very richest of people will be able to afford the brand new sextuple-core wonder chip.

SiriusB

The only thing that can really take advantage of quad core is folding, for everything else the hardware has outpaced the software.
Still they can never go far until heat becomes an issue thanks to the appalling thermal characteristics of the atx spec. Kensfield is clearly heat limited. This is a shame for us overclockers because it makes squeezing extra speed out of it a nightmare.

The nice thing about this 'keep adding cores' approach to progress is you can have a cpu thats just as fast as the latest multi core offering and for single threaded stuff its the same speed. For example, E6700 owners have a cpu that gives exactly the same performance as the new QX6700 for gaming.
Unfortunately for us there was also a leap in actual core performance with conroe aswell.

 

[Stan_Lite]

The only thing that can really take advantage of quad core is folding, for everything else the hardware has outpaced the software.

Not entirely true. An article on the PCAdvisor website says that testing they have seen shows that Kentsfields considerably outperform C2Ds at video encoding and 3D rendering.

Kentsfield really starts to shine, however, once you hand it a complex video-encoding or 3D-rendering task. Both 3D rendering apps, POV-Ray and 3DS Max 8, ran considerably faster with four cores; in particular, POV-Ray rendered 83 percent more pixels per second running on the Kentsfield chip than on the Core 2 Extreme. Video editing and encoding ran about 30 percent faster in Sony's Vegas app and in the DivX converter.

Stan

 

[Joe42]

Gpu folders; Anyone tried the new catalyst 610s with official support? Do they work ok?
Need to know so that i can add a link to the quick guide.

Worth downloading as it may well give some speed and stability improvements.

 

[SiriusB]

Not in the mood to muck about with drivers tonight but I am sure that the 6.10s work now.

SiriusB

 

[Joe42]

Ok well i'll put them in the quick guide, and if anyone has any problems with them let me know so i can remove the link.

Something i found the other day that i was thinking of putting in the guide somewhere:
http://short-media.com/files/thraxfoldingflash/


Edit: Media centre just stopped picking up tv. Reducing the fsb back to stock fixed it. Am i right in thinking pci locks are a thing of the past and this board should have one built in?

 

[SiriusB]

A decent clockers board should automatically lock stuff like the PCI bus. However I suspect some you still might have to set the lock manually.

SiriusB

 

[A.N.Other]

http://short-media.com/files/thraxfoldingflash/

That music makes small fluffy animals cry . I'm not exactly sure how doing F@H is courageous either.

Still, the thought's there

Thanks for the news, Rich.

 

[Freefaller]

I might add my new work laptop to it - are Duo Centrinos any good for crunching?

 

[MGP]

Mine's doing alright, nothing special, It all adds to the total. I can see your trying to delay the inevitable stomping, in a weeks time

125ppd, per core, for an amber 1809 and as much as 167ppd, per core, when it got a GBGromac 2089. That's with a T2400 (1.83Ghz), 1GB 533 DDR2 Ram.