Pentium III's and Folding

Mr. Brightside

Mr. Brightside

Mr. Brightside

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Joined
27 Apr 2004
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2,377
I recently acquired a Fujitsu Siemens E200 server, supporting dual PIIIs. Atm it has a single 866mhz chip in. However, partly due to recent competition from The_Alabama_Slamma (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=176008), I have decided to try and get hold of a pair of 1ghz chips depending on whether the price is right. My question is this; what sort of performance can I expect from them for folding? Better or worse than the single 2ghz Celeron I have in my main server?

Bearing in mind that I will be installing Debian on it, what will be the best software setup in terms of performance? I seem to remember reading somewhere that you get better performance under Wine?

Thanks, null :)

/ tries to resist urge to install FAH on laptop
 
Yeah, that Slamma has been giving a lot of problems lately. dual 1GHz P3s will be pretty good. I expect you'd see around 75-100ppd from the machine. They will be able to run Gromacs at full speed due to having SSE and as a high-end machine it'll probably have a fairly good amount of RAM. You should definitely get it running.

As for configuration, I suggest big WUs as a definite. with -advmethods on now you'll see a lot of FahCore_a0.exe. This isn't a bad core, but it's not great either. Use -advmethods at your leisure.

I have no idea how it will stack up against the celeron. I expect they'd be about the same becasue the P3s had a lot of cache for their era and the Smelleron has not a lot of cache for its era. I dunno. Try it out and tell s how it goes?
null said:
/tries to resist urge to install FAH on laptop
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Resistance is futile! :mad: :D :mad:
 
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hehe I shouldn't worry about the Slamma... look over your shoulder Mmm about 27 places behind *winks*
 
Excellent. I'm bidding right now :). Auction ends this time tomorrow so will know soon. With regards to RAM, it has a moderate 256mb. Is that enough?

Also, I break up from school on Wednesday for the Easter holidays, meaning battery life on the laptop will no longer be an issue. May have to set it crunching for a bit :D
 
BigDom said:
hehe I shouldn't worry about the Slamma... look over your shoulder Mmm about 27 places behind *winks*
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Eeeeeeeeep didn't see you there :eek: :eek: :eek:

Right there's no holding back now, full steam ahead cap'ain! Will have to see what rigs I can enlist for the Fold :cool:
 
It is enough as a bare minimum but it'd probably be better off with at least 512 MiB so it wouldn't have to page quite as much. What else will this machine be doing?

/forgot to mention it above, I wouldn't worry about running it under WINE. From what I've read lately the differences between the Windows and Linux client in terms of performance is very small.
 
null said:
Eeeeeeeeep didn't see you there :eek: :eek: :eek:

Right there's no holding back now, full steam ahead cap'ain! Will have to see what rigs I can enlist for the Fold :cool:
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Best of luck to you S'ah.. be warned that the BigDom powerhouse will be moving up a notch soon with the addition of a dual core intel box :D
 
P3 box will be doing nothing else in particular. It's main purpose is as a Sandbox for me to experiment with Linux in - LAMP kinda stuff. Probably won't have much other load on it, but will be using memory for Apache etc.

And BigDom... you've pretty much stomped me already. Unless.. unless I can get my friends to start crunching for me.. fat chance of them crunching at all let alone for me :(
 
256 MiB ram would be OK then but I would definitely make an effort to get another 256 MiB. Since this is a server board I take it that it wants ECC registered RAM. This can be rather expensive, especially for obsolete PC100 and PC133 styles.
 
null said:
P3 box will be doing nothing else in particular. It's main purpose is as a Sandbox for me to experiment with Linux in - LAMP kinda stuff. Probably won't have much other load on it, but will be using memory for Apache etc.

And BigDom... you've pretty much stomped me already. Unless.. unless I can get my friends to start crunching for me.. fat chance of them crunching at all let alone for me :(
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Hehe have to say I was more than a little stunned myself to see my output per day but it's now at about the right level. 700ish
 
null said:
Just won it! :) Only thing is I need to find a heatsink for the extra one :o
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Looks like i'll be getting stomped! ;)
Easter holidays start for me on friday, i should almost double my production.
I'll see if i can hold you off...
And the 'Slamma for that matter.
Looking forward to moving onto the front page and top 100.
 
Ace, I'm waiting for my P3s to come. Two 933s and two 800s. Total cost not including P+P: £17. The 800s were £1 for the pair :D and the machine in total has cost me about £140inc. RDRAM was the most expensive part, £60 for 512mb :eek:

I shall probably get more P3 stuff is this preforms well and make an SDRAM cruncher with the two 800Mhz chips.
 
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monkeypants said:
Ace, I'm waiting for my P3s to come. Two 933s and two 800s. Total cost not including P+P: £17. The 800s were £1 for the pair :D and the machine in total has cost me about £140inc. RDRAM was the most expensive part, £60 for 512mb :eek:

I shall probably get more P3 stuff is this preforms well and make an SDRAM cruncher with the two 800Mhz chips.
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Sounds like a bit of budget competition...

Maybe matchup My new £300 P4 Dual Core cruncher against the P3's and Mr Impalers Zeons? See who can get the most work done/£1 spent.
 
Joe42 said:
Easter holidays start for me on friday, i should almost double my production.
I'll see if i can hold you off...
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My Easter holidays started.. TODAY :D I borged my laptop about an hour ago and it shall be crunching 'till back to school. Mwuahahahahah. Fancy a race? :cool:
 
null said:
My Easter holidays started.. TODAY :D I borged my laptop about an hour ago and it shall be crunching 'till back to school. Mwuahahahahah. Fancy a race? :cool:
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You're on! :D
Still having some problems getting units to send which is slowing me down somewhat.

Edit: Rebooting a few times seems to be getting the units to send, unless its just pot luck. My official doubling of production starts tomorrow.
Going to order some more silencing stuff soon so i can leave it on overnight.

What do you have folding for you atm, just so i know what i'm up against?

I have:
-Opteron 175 (X2 4400+) @ Stock, doing 6 hours/day. Soon to be doing 12 hours/day.
-A64 3200+ , about 8 hours/day
-Sempron 3000+ @ 3300+ speeds, 12 hours/day

Intermittently i also have a p3 733 folding.

Should i get the Pm 1.7 laptop folding?
I'm worried it might fry tho or the fan will fail.
 
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Well the P3s arrived this morning. A journey to OcUK later this afternoon and I came back armed with heatsinks. I've just installed the new CPUs now, and shall be sorting out an OS for it in the next few days.

Now, the question; what kit do I have running. Well originally it was my P4 Prescott 3.0, an Athlon 2600+ and a P4 Willamette 1.8. These had been going 24/7 though I switched my P4 *ff a few nights a week.

However as I said earlier, I borged my Dothan 1.7 laptop yesterday, and you should do the same :D I hope to have an additional Smeleron 2.4 added for the cause by the end of today. That's all for now, but if I can get hold of a P3 mobo freely (I'm skint now :(), then I have enough spare parts to make another cruncher out of the now redundant P3 866mhz I have.

On with the crunch :D

About borging your laptop; mine has been fine and it's done heavy crunching before for a period back when I did Climate Prediction. Fan hasn't failed and I doubt yours will; and in the very unlikely event it does, that's what thermal throttling is for (or you could set it to shutdown with Speedfan or similar):)
 
I wouldn't worry about a lappy with a Pentium mobile CPU. I ran SETI then FAH on my 1.5 Mobile from the day I bought it and I ahven't seen any problems. The only thing to which I suggest you pay close attention is the CPU heatsink. Becasue of the shape of most of them they are very likely to get clogged with dust, hair, potato chip residue, and whatever else is in the air nearly. I find on mine that it happens right up next to the fan so to clean it properly I must remove the fan. It's no hassle and it's wicked fast, at least as fast as a P4 Prescott at 3.0. :eek:
 
¡¡¡MEGA BAD-NESS!!!

The P3 Xeons are slot 2! My board is slot 1 as this is what the CPUs were advertised as. Now I need a dual slot 2 motherboard that does RDRAM and AGP. Gah!
 
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