What shall I crunch/fold?

CaptainUnlikely

CaptainUnlikely

CaptainUnlikely

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Well, I downsized my PC recently and I'm now running with a Celeron G530 - yeah, I can feel your jealousy :D
It ain't going to fold all that well, but I was considering maybe running two classic clients to get some of that work done, but then I got to wondering if there's a better use for my somewhat limited resources.
So, is there anything we're currently struggling on? I know it's not a source of major firepower but every little helps and it'll run 24/7.
Open to any suggestions really :) I've never done anything but F@H so bear with me if I struggle getting anything else set up heh.
 
Sounds great. If the deadlines aren't too short I can also get three cores of my family's Athlon quad on it, it's not on for more than a few hours a day but if it'll make deadlines it can crunch on that.
 
Sweet, all downloaded and running. My internet is horrifically slow at the minute so it's just taken me half an hour to download the inital 60MB of work...sigh. I can see the deadlines are quite relaxed though so I'll give it a whirl on my family's PC too when I've settled in with it on mine.
 
I've seen that preference but wasn't clear on exactly what it did, thanks for clearing that up. It's set to default right now which I guess is 5 hours? As both tasks that are running say elapsed: 35 minutes, remaining: 4 hours 14 minutes.
It shouldn't make any difference what I set that interval to though, unless I'm thinking of it the wrong way, if it's crunching 24/7 - right?
I've set BOINC to get a minimum of 0.5 days work and max of 2 days, just in case of any network problems.
 
Ah, ok, that does make sense, thanks. One question - does Rosetta use a checkpoint system like F@H? If so, how long is the interval, and can it be changed? OK, three questions, so sue me :)
 
Oh, and Rosetta does use a lot of RAM, assuming that's normal? I'm used to F@H which doesn't use all that much so seeing one Rosetta process using 360MB and the other on 440MB is quite unusual heh, nothing to worry about as I have plenty to spare but just checking that's normal.
 
Cool, just wanted to check about the RAM.
I did see that setting, if that's the checkpoint interval then that's fine with me, I won't need to change it. Hopefully that's most of my n00b questions out of the way!
 
One more question!
Is it worth getting my GPU crunching too? It's only a 6450 but I heard that ATI cards do really well in some BOINC projects, thought it might be worth throwing it in there as it uses so little power. I know it can't do Rosetta, but maybe there's something else worth doing?
 
Pumpkinstew said:
I think Milkyway is the one that suits ATI cards?

Someone else might correct me on that. (I'm an Nvidia owner).
Click to expand...

This is my first ATI card since a Mobility X1600 so I'm pretty out of touch heh. I've seen a list of projects that can use an ATI card, just not sure which it'll be any good at, being a pretty low end model, but I'll give Milkyway a shot tonight, see how it runs. I can always swap it to something else if it's no good :)
 
TheTross said:
Unfortunately your 6450 won't run Milkyway@home as it's not capable of performing double precision arithmetic, which Milkyway needs. Collatz Conjecture would be suitable, but I'm not sure if that project is of any interest to you.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok, as I said I'm not too familiar with ATI cards as I haven't had one for years heh. Thanks for that.
I'll fire up Collatz tonight in that case then, it doesn't particularly interest me as a project in the same way that F@H and R@H do but I'll do it for the points and the team - sure it will be a huge boost to production :D
 
OK, well, I'm crunching away happily on Rosetta and Collatz now, I'm getting a bit more used to the way BOINC works. One more question that's come up though - Collatz at the minute is getting two units, one that runs on the GPU and a "mini Collatz" that crunches on the CPU, which I don't want. I've gone into the Collatz preferences and told it not to use the CPU, and also unticked mini Collatz, but every time it finishes one of those units it's grabbing another. Is it meant to do that, or is it some kind of bug? I know I might be better off asking on the Collatz forums, but I thought I'd ask here first in case I'm just doing something wrong :)
 
At least that confirms what I thought, and it's not me just reading it wrong. I have that preference set to No at the minute, I've just checked it, saved preference, unchecked, saved again and manually updated from BOINC to make sure it's definitely No, and I'll see how that goes. If it's still crunching Collatz on the CPU tomorrow, I'll try resetting all the settings back to default, manually update from BOINC, and set them all again, see if that makes any difference.
 
OK, removing and re adding Collatz as well as checking all CPU related preferences, updating, then unchecking them again seems to have fixed it, now it's only downloading GPU units. Woo!
I don't know how the credit and RAC stacks up between projects so I think I'll have to wait till the team news to see how well it's doing, but so far my lil' 6450 has done 12654 credits for Collatz, RAC of 1197 - well, with a bit of CPU help, but not that much. I'm planning on re-applying thermal paste and rigging up a little fan to help out the passively cooled card though - temps are fine but, as with anything, I want to overclock it :)
Does RAM speed/timings have much effect on Rosetta? Obviously my CPU is locked but I'm running my 1600MHz RAM at 1333 right now because my board was having some problems at first, turned out it was a bad BIOS flash rather than memory instability but I haven't bothered tweaking it yet. If it makes a decent difference I'll clock it back up, though,
 
Well, the Celeron doesn't appear to like me changing any RAM settings, it's actually at 1066MHz because that's the maximum officially supported speed - I forgot the Celerons have a lower max than the other SBs. Changing the speed to 1333 even with relaxed timings and pumped up voltage results in a no POST, so it'll just have to stay at 1066. Ah well, I'm sure it wouldn't have made much difference anyhow.
I'll rig up a fan and get the 6450 clocked tonight, just for the fun of it. I'll also get myself a shiny new sign to replace my F@H one, as I won't be doing any folding now till I get my new PC which will be a long time.
 
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