What makes a processor good at SETI?

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Billl
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What makes a processor good at SETI?

Post by Billl »

I have a Celeron 533 OC'ed to 824 with 384 megs and a 566 OC'ed to 860 with 384 megs. I just put together a Dell Optiplex GX110 with a 733 pIII and 256 megs. It would seem to me the Dell should produce faster results given it's faster front side bus and larger cache. But that doesn't seem to be the case. It's doing 9+hr WU's while the Celeron's are doing 8+hr and 7+hr WU's respectively. Anyone have any thoughts on this? All 3 machines are running win 98. I think both Celeron's are using 98SE and the Dell has 98 on it. I was screwing around last night just to see if it would work so I found a drive that had 98 installed previously from some other machine. Took me a while to straighten out drivers but everything is working hardware wise except sound. Drivers loaded all hardware conflicts are fixed just no sound. I don't believe that would have any effect on system performance. But I could be wrong. I'm not looking to fix the sound issue this thing is strictly for crunching. Just included the details so everyone knows what I did. Normally I would install an OS from scratch but I was just currious how this Dell would work. I picked it up cheap so I wasn't sure if it was even worth bothering with.


Billl
Holodeck2
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Post by Holodeck2 »

there might be something in the background eating up clock cycles or something's misconfigured
also more ram helps too
work units also vary, some get done faster
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hugoc
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Post by hugoc »

Are you running the command-line client? The screensaver uses more cycles. SETI does not use that much RAM (I found the command-line client used about 12000K regardless of how much I had free) so your PIII should crunch significantly faster than either Celeron. Run "msconfig" at the command prompt and see what's loading on startup, you might be surprised - some spyware or a worm might have burrowed in there.

While you're at it, do a full scan of Ad-Aware and Seek 'n' Destroy, CWShredder and HijackThis, and your updated virus scanner of choice.
BP6, RU BIOS, 2*Celeron 366@550 1.9v
2*GlobalWin FEP32, 512MB PC100 CAS2
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Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

cpu speed would be the first thing to look at.
the 733 is the slowest, ergo....
if you had them all at the same speed, then look at clock multiplier, a low multi, (733 @ 5.5 ) would be good, but an earlier celie, (300 @ 4.5) would show better, with fsb being higher.
then look at onboard cache.
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