Which computer will fold faster?

Tim

I was wondering which of these 2 computers would turn in more points per hour or points per day.

I have an Abit BP6 dual CPU motherboard running 2 seperate folding programs right now. It has Windows 2000 Pro, twin 533 Celeron processors overclocked to 600 Mhz, and 2 sticks of 128 MB PC133 SDRAM for 256 MB total. Large work units are turned off now.

Or I could sell it and build another system on an ECS motherboard that I can get cheaply. It'd be a 2 Ghz AMD Athlon XP, like a 2400 or so, and of course it'll also be overclocked, to maybe 2.2 - 2.5 Ghz if it'll do it. That would be able to run only one work unit at a time, of course. Maybe 1 stick of 256 MB PC2700 or PC3200 memory.

So I'm wondering if the points from 2 slower folding WU's would be equal to or greater than the points from one WU folding faster. And on the AMD I may enable large work units if it can handle it memory wise.

mmonnin

By far the AMD machine.

The AMD has 3dnow! and SSE which are used by the Gromac WUs. The other celerons wont have that I dont think. Plus AMDs fold better than Intel on tinkers and AMDs fold better per mhz. So since the Celerons dont even come close to adding up to a stock athlon, the AMD would be much better.

muddocktor

Definitely the AMD setup, Tim. Marc pretty well covered all the reasons.

lemonlime

I believe the celeron did not incorperate SSE support until the 800MHz model came out (the one with the 100MHz FSB). I had a pair of 366MHz celerons in a BP6 (OC'd to 550), and they did a pretty poor folding job. The AMD machine will outpace it by a pretty large margin I would say..

primesuspect

Yep, sad to say the single proc AMD box will blow away the dual cellys. I speak from experience on this matter. I had a dual celly 400 setup and my 2000+ just blew them away in folding production.

Straight_Man

mmonnin wrote:

By far the AMD machine.

The AMD has 3dnow! and SSE which are used by the Gromac WUs. The other Celerons wont have that I dont think. Plus AMDs fold better than Intel on tinkers and AMDs fold better per mhz. So since the Celerons dont even come close to adding up to a stock athlon, the AMD would be much better.

The Celerons of that age group will have SSE, but 3DNow is indeed an AMD feature. Both Intel and AMD have SSE, and many have SSE2 also.

ECS has some good boards, some bad, you folks seem to think that the ECS board should be better, but I would look into an Abit Athlon supporting board as next upgrade, myself. ECS has used a lot of Via chipsets in the past, some of which STUNK. Second, better RAM would be required also, so I would either delay upgrade by buying parts gradually, or by saving funds and then upgrading both at once. Remember the thread starter has a dualie going now.

muddocktor

John brings up some good points, especially about the ECS boards. You can also find some good deals on other maufacturer's mobo's that are of better build quality than ECS. 2 that immediately come to mind are Shuttle and Biostar, both of which I've had experience with. Abit also builds some great boards but you will probably find better prices on the Shuttle and Biostar products.

mmonnin

Even if they did have SSE, the athlon is still way better.

edcentric

I am running an MSI KT2 Combo. It is socket A, uses the 266A chipset, and will take either SDRAM or DDR. I bought it because I had a socket A CPU and some SDRAM. Since I have swaped out for DDR.
No, it doesn't OC worth a damn. But it is stable and reliable.

As a point of reference, I am running 5 socket A machines. A bunch of different CPUs (TBird, TBred B, Barton). On average I get a liiter over 500 points/week/GHz. This varies about +/-15% depending on the current mix of work units.