In article <472e80ff$1@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfit61nz@yahooligans.co.nz> wrote:

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

Somewhere on the interweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

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.

If you can't afford to crunch, don't crunch, would be my advise...

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.

It will probably consume less power at full load than the old system did?

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).

Why risk a major investment of yourself to overclocking? What are the 
temperatures of the rig when you're not overclocking it?

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).

No idea if this is even possible using WinXP. I mainly thought BOINC was 
meant to consume any spare CPU cycles you have left. That's why both the 
Linux as well as the Win32 version run at a relatively low priority. I'm 
running it also on a few Linux boxes (even a very old P133 with 64MB), and 
it doesn't have much impact on the general responsiveness of said systems. 
Same for the WinXP boxes.

Perhaps try posting your question in one of the BOINC related forums, or 
mail it to one of the developers...? I don't think WinXP has the means to 
give an application 50% of the available resources. BOINC provides a 
rather crude way to do it. Apparently the 'fine-grained' version operates 
on a 1-second resolution.

The 'coarse-grained' variant, using a start/stop time for crunching, would 
save you on the 2Hz 'speed-bumping', but while the machine is crunching it 
would still be heating up and running at 100%. Perhaps a third-party 
'batching' tool could do it, not sure if any are available...

What happens when you tell BOINC to only use 1 CPU as a maximum? That 
would only start one setiathome process on your system, but it probably 
depends on WinXP on which core the process ends up.

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>

You did, a little bit. ;) And, err, I don't think your system will provide 
a major contribution to global warming. :)

Anyway, I don't think my system does either (Q6600, non overlocked), so 
I'll let it crunch 24/7 at 100%. It's probably outputting more WU's than 
all my other machines I'm running it on. ;)

I rather like BOINC, much smoother operation than the original setiathome 
application, with plenty of control to at least tune the amount of work 
you cache. I suppose it's a bit of a problem if you're trying to feed a 
farm of computers which are not connected to the internet, but that's not 
something I have to deal with.

Regards, Patrick.