| Subject: Re: recommendations for a inexpensive S@H cruncher? |
| From: Martin 53N 1W |
| Date: 13/01/2005, 14:50 |
like to know my fellow crunchers opinions and ideas on this subject
what is the most inexpensive but at the same time powerful cruncher....say
between 40 and 100 wu's a week?
tia
Franco
ytrewq wrote:
> Is this machine going to be used for anything other than crunching?
> What OS are you anticipating using? Win XP?
> The "mainstream $$" HT (Hyper Threading) Pentium 4 CPU's will do more
> WU/day/$ than Athlon because of their ability to do 2 WU (Work Units)
at the
> same time.
The real question should be for how many WUs per "$" (or "£" (:-))...
Intel's HT is a good kludge to overcome restrictions in their CPU
architecture. I think that the latest hard benchmark results have blown
Intel's marketed "performance = GHz" myth.
At the moment, AMD seem to still give the best Mflops per unit cost. The
question is more for whether to stay on 32-bits or to go for one of the
newer 64-bit machines.
Stay away from the cache crippled cheapies. The less cost is not worth
the performance hit due to the lack of a good sized on-chip cache.
If this is a dedicated s@h cruncher, then save money by not buying any
OS and use one of the bootable Linux + s@h distros that you can download
from the web. Almost 'plug-n-play'! (And no MS virus overheads or
antivirus needed.)
Good luck,
Martin