KWSN Orbiting Fortress

Pooh Bear 27 · Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:22 am Post subject: Deciding to or not to retire

I have a P3-600 machine that has been a beautiful workhorse for many years. It went through several changes, and is now living it's days just crunching away. I am finally biting the bullet and buying me a new computer for my enjoyment and use, and my 1.8G will be revamped and go into the other computer room. I have room on the KVM to keep the P3 going, but I am unsure the electric to run it is worth the small amount of work it does. The RAC sits around 75-77. The next lowest machine is over 190. With me purchasing what looks to be a Core 2 Duo E6400, my crunching will go through the roof, and this lowly P3 will look like more of a peanut.

I could have a home for it, someplace else. I have a friend with 3 children, who has trouble with getting a decent job, and life is rough on money. Right now their computer is a P3 Celery 400. This would surely give them a boost.

Maybe I just needed to type this out, and give myself some time to really put it in perspective. I am pretty sure I will retire it from crunching, and hand it off to the friend.
_________________
Watch the movie about me The 4-1-4s: The Original Teenage Hackers (It is only about 12 minutes long.)
My lucky numbers are 121*2^4553899-1 and 3756801695685*2^666669±1

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

I recommend you sign up for a BOINC account manager like BAM, set it up on that machine so you have full admin control over BOINC remotely (nothing else, no worries of hijacking their PC hehe) and keep it going. Set it up to only run when idle, to unload when not running, etc. That's what I've got going on my weakest machine. It can't handle background crunching, nor does it have enough RAM to leave stuff loaded while suspended, but it still does it's share every day even if it's not much.

You could (try to) explain to them what it's doing, and why, it IS scientific research after all. I say try to because that's what I did with the machine that's now with someone else and I got glassy eyes almost instantly, and that blank smiling nod until I finally gave up trying to explain it.
_________________

Stats: [BOINC Synergy] - [Free-DC] - [MundayWeb] - [Netsoft] - [All Project Stats]

Mildew · Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 11:16 am Post subject:

Just two weeks ago I scrapped a 2GHz AMD 2800+ since I thought it wasn't worth the electricity and heat it generated, so yea, I pretty much would recommend getting rid of the P3-600. (I replaced it with a dual core 4600+ instead Wink

)
Give the old computer to your friend. Sounds like they will have a lot more use for it than you have.
#ni-1

_________________

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?

Fart in your gen direxion · Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 12:03 pm Post subject:

Give it away or donate it Cool

.

Pooh Bear 27 · Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:19 pm Post subject:

Well, it's counting down it's last couple of days of work. I have set it to no new work, and it will finish sometime in the next 48 hours. Then I will boot to a CD, wipe the drive, and hand it off.

The good news is I am finally going to move up in the world. I have been using a P4 1.8G desktop for the past 6 years, as my main machine. It's been nice to me, and has gone through several changes. I am going to retire it to the farm of just crunching, as I have bought myself a Core 2 Duo, E6400 Conroe. It should be here within 10 days.

I made an assumption of the C2D that I guess has me a little off my game. I considered Core 2, and Duo as two X two, meaning 4 processing threads. I guess I am wrong, and it's only 2 processors on a single chip. What a way to fool the consumer into thinking there is more to a chip than there really is.

I have been looking at crunching times on these boxes, and I am impressed. It should make a nice addition to my farm, and I should never miss the P3-600.
_________________
Watch the movie about me The 4-1-4s: The Original Teenage Hackers (It is only about 12 minutes long.)
My lucky numbers are 121*2^4553899-1 and 3756801695685*2^666669±1

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Yeah, the 6400 is what I'm running. 3 of them in my farm hehe. Crunching time they're pretty similar to my AMD XP 3000+... except they're doing 2 WUs at a time hehe. The 6400's benchmark badly for whatever reason (or at least all 3 of mine did) and WUs report taking much longer than they actually do, every WU makes it re-calc how long the others will take. And, oddly enough, BoincView shows the 6400 as doing less numerical work than my XP 3k+, but the 6400's do the WUs slightly faster (not counting that the 6400 is doing 2 at once). For example, when I had both machines doing CPDN a full WU reported 82 days to completion on the 6400 and 86 days on the XP 3k, despite the XP3k showing more instructions/second. Figure that out.
_________________

Stats: [BOINC Synergy] - [Free-DC] - [MundayWeb] - [Netsoft] - [All Project Stats]

Killerrabbit · Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2007 8:20 pm Post subject:

Put it to my account, I could use the extra credit.

Ni
_________________