Celerons or Pentiums for folding?
Tim
Southwest PA Icrontian
I have a couple AMD Athlon systems folding for me now in my apartment, and was thinking of adding a P4 / Celeron system.
Here's what I need to know. When folding is the main concern, are Pentium 4's and equivalent Celeron chips any better or worse for folding compared to each other? I know that Celerons have less cache and things like that, but I wonder how it would affect folding operations.
As in if you have a Socket 478 P4 at 3 Ghz, and a Socket 478 Celeron at 3 Ghz, will one fold faster and would the difference be very obvious? I'm looking at 32 bit CPUs, as they are cheaper now than anything dual core or 64 bit.
I'm sure there may be other hardware that is better or worse, but I'm mainly concerned with the CPUs right now.
Here's what I need to know. When folding is the main concern, are Pentium 4's and equivalent Celeron chips any better or worse for folding compared to each other? I know that Celerons have less cache and things like that, but I wonder how it would affect folding operations.
As in if you have a Socket 478 P4 at 3 Ghz, and a Socket 478 Celeron at 3 Ghz, will one fold faster and would the difference be very obvious? I'm looking at 32 bit CPUs, as they are cheaper now than anything dual core or 64 bit.
I'm sure there may be other hardware that is better or worse, but I'm mainly concerned with the CPUs right now.
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Comments
If the P4 is a "C" revision Northwood, there is big advantage over Celeron. If you run two instances of Folding with a Northwood under Hyperthreading, one instance for the core and another instance for the virtual core, you will see a production increase of around 20 to 25% over running with only one instance with Hyperthreading turned off. Hyperthreading was mainly a bust, a desperate Intel attempt to make the Pentium 4's work better. One of the few things Hyperthreading works very well at is Folding@Home. Remember though, both the CPU and motherboard have to be Hyperthreading capable for it to work.
Datsun 1600
Why are you always looking for outdated hardware, and are looking to explicitly buy yourself into dead end hardware?
I am guessing that he probabley has a skt478 board and ram handy, and just wants to add a cpu.
I'm juss guessin though.
Later
Maybe a 64 bit CPU would fold a lot better, but if it costs twice as much, I'm not interested.
I absolutely could not agree with you more, my brother drew the line for the old skt478 and single cored platforms about 2 months ago. Currently what we have folding is skt 478's & 775's "single cores & not to mention their power consumption is horrendous."
We have a fair few that have been retired alltogether as their returns are now not worth the cost in power. We are going the Core2 duo route after xmas "less power consumption running cooler which equates to a lower electric bill" with the possibility of one or two 4 core setups in the mix. "He just wants to see how they handle the heat etc."
Main reason he is holding back on 4 core's is that he is worried about heat output etc etc and the plan is to run without AC so being that the Core2 Duo's run nice and cool. That is the option he is primarily going for and it will be in an non AC enviroment.
"Reason"
At the peak of our output last summer 10 to 15K a day, our electric bill was averaging $2500 a quarter.....and that is something we are not prepared to do again!.
So simply put Core2 Duo is our best option at this point in time.
Shal
Just my 2 cents worth.
Datsun 1600
I had overclocked this one, Celeron-D 310 , from 2.13 to 3.2 GHz with stock voltage and stock cooler just by raising the FSB to 200. With dual channel DDR400, its performance was roughly equivalent to a 3.06 Xeon (512K L2, 133 FSB, dual channel DDR266) that I had on my desktop at work. I do not have the computer anymore, but I hear that it is still running fine at a friend's house.
However, I agree with Datsun. I guess, I would buy these processors as they deliver better than the overclocked performance of Celeron-D at stock speed for almost the same price.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 1.8GHz Socket 939 Processor
or
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 2.0GHz Socket 939 Processor
You can find an open-box or new S939 motherboard for a very low price for these processors.
Any parts selection tips? Remember, cheap and fast for folding is going to be its only real purpose.
What components do you already have? If you do not have a graphics card you might want to check this out
Foxconn 6100K8MA-RS Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
This is just to give an idea, there are many other MBs in the similar price category. If you do not have RAM, it will be expensive since the prices have been high recently. Actually you might want go with a socket AM2 processor, instead of investing in DDR. There is higher chance that you can find DDR2 cheaper than DDR and the price difference might cover the price difference between the AM2 processor and 939 processor. So many trade offs ....
Later ...
Overclocked 805 @ 3.2Ghz on stock cooling - currently $98 on newegg
definitely. Go for a server-class motherboard with some serious power management. Same goes for the PSU. I think it's been shown that you can do 3.0-3.2Ghz on stock cooling and voltages, though...
Leonardo, I have no idea about the backwards compatibility...
The E4300 will be a 1.8 GHz part on a 200 fsb, giving you a 9 multiplier. My 775i865G is stable to 289 fsb. With that range of fsb options, the E4300 would give you a 2600 MHz processor and mobo for around $200. I will be buying me an E4300 for my board when Intel starts selling them and I will use the E6300 on a more modern mobo when I get rid of my last P4 system early next year.
So, you think a server-class motherboard would overclock PD-805 better? Hey, nice idea
A quality motherboard and decent cooling runs for at least $150. Do you think it is worth spending this for a PD-805? Buy a 60 dollar board, say Asrock Dual775 + E6300 for 190, makes what, $250? The cost of decent cooling + quality motherboard + PD-805 is the same. Which one would you buy? I am not mentioning about overclocking potential of E6300 yet.
the server-class mobo is for the more capable power regulation. Tom's boosted an 805 to 3.2Ghz on stock cooling and voltage. Over 4Ghz with water cooling. So yes, that is a nice overclock for a processor that costs less than $100. The board will be more expensive for the better power regulation, but wen your performance is up in P4EE-land, not bad.
Here is the article, it's a good read, check it out.
AMD 1.8 Ghz vs Intel 3.2 Ghz - which will fold faster, all else in the computer being equal?
They usually offer those kits with single-channel, lowest-end motherboards. Actually, Sempron 3000 is socket 754, which is single channel by default. Avoiding the high price of a top-quality motherboard is okay but going this low will be wasting your money, imho. If you can give the links, I could check them out.
The later folds aproximatelly 20-30% faster because of the extra cache and runs very cool.
If you go the 478 route for folding, I would recommend Northwoods only... any prescott based P4 may perform similarly but heats and power consumes like HELL.
I can verify this. I OC'ed a 2.8 Prescott in an old gaming rig of mine, they're like little space heaters stock, if you OC them, they require a lot of power and a lot of cooling. Not only will you be investing na major heatsink, but your board had better have some good power regulation. IMHO, the prescotts weren't exactly the best processor Intel has put out, in terms of the processing you get for the heat and power usage.
Overall, I wouldn't consider using a prescott in a high-performance rig ever again, simply because of their inherent power and heat problems. Especially in an OC'ed rig, where these problems will be amplified to a large degree. Heavily OC'ed rigs have their own problems, might as well not start out with a processor that is two steps behind. YMMV....
Amen, let Prescott RIP. I think, even Intel will not want to remember them, 90nm (P1262) process development of Prescott was probably the most painful process development ever.