Hi Patrick! Fancy seeing you here. Usenet's a small world huh?

Somewhere on the interweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

In article <472c7025@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfit61nz@yahooligans.co.nz> wrote:

[snip]

I'm seriously considering stopping crunching, my PC is my
precioussss, I don't mind using it to do some work for SETI but I
don't want to torture it. What do others think?

Why not just let it crunch at 100%? It's running at a relatively low
priority as is?

There's a couple reasons  I don't want it to run at 100%. Firstly, I'm on a 
very limited income and my PC is one of the biggest consumers of electricity 
in my house. That's why I stopped crunching with my Barton, it was sucking 
the power (and throwing out the heat) and my electricity bills dropped heaps 
when I stopped crunching.

However, with this machine, that will do five times the "work" that my 
Barton did and is more efficient, (about the same power consumption as the 
Barton) I figured that I could afford to dedicate a /certain amount/ of 
CPU/electricity to SETI, still give more than my Barton did, and not stress 
my power bill or my CPU.

The second thing is heat. I'm an overclocker. I have this E4500 running at 
2.93GHz instead of it's default 2.2GHz. (Although core voltage is till 
default.) As I'm on a limited budget I'm still using the stock cooler until 
I can afford something better. The CPU itself doesn't get *too* hot, topping 
out at a maximum of 60�C under full load. However, it's not summer yet, and 
my HDDs etc, are running hotter than I'd like when the CPU is pumping out 
the heat. (Like I said, limited budget, can't afford a nice new, 
well-ventilated case).

I run the command line version of BOINC. It's running at 100%. I even
let it run at 100% when I play a low-resources game (like Diablo II).
When I want to run something beefier (HL2, Crysis, Bioshock, etc), I
just Ctrl-Break in the window, and manually restart it when I stop
playing.

Ok. Yeah, running at 100% would be far less stressful on the system. I just 
wish they'd write better code, make it easy for casual contributers like me 
to be able to give a bit without having my CPU rocketing from 100% to 0% 
then back to 100% every second. I mean, seriously, that can't be good for 
it, especially considering how quickly it responds thermally to those 
fluctuations, going up and down over 10�C each second. How hard can it be to 
write it so that it just uses a certain amount of CPU constantly? Most 
programmes do just that (I run a few monitoring apps in the backgroud so I 
know *exactly* what's going on).

Anyway, as long as it's gonna treat my CPU like this I'm thinking I'm not 
going to participate anymore. Also, being completely sold on the reality of 
global warming I'm not about to leave my CPU running at 100% for what is, at 
best, a long-shot. I've been with SETI since '99 and, when PCs used far less 
power and before the evidence came in for human-catalysed global warming, I 
didn't mind using 100% CPU. Now, I'd use 50% (I used 75% as an example 
earlier, I've tried several settings) of my CPU as it doesn't seem to impact 
the heat output, (therefore the power input) much more than when the machine 
is idling.

I don't want to contribute to the death of humanity via catastrophic global 
changes in weather patterns, looking for stray signs that there may be other 
intelligent life forms out there, probably watching us kill ourselves on 
reality TV.

Hmmm, seems I've digressed a little. <g>

Good to "see" you Patrick.
-- 
Shaun.