Somewhere on the interweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

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...

But that's so black and white.. Some months I have a few dollars more and 
would maybe like to crunch.

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?

About the same I think while OC'ed, although for five times the work that's 
a good deal.

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?

There's no risk at all if you know what you're doing. And I *do* know what 
I'm doing. I've been overclocking since Pentium (1) days and have never had 
an overclocking-related failure.

I overclock to get the most out of my CPU. I can't afford a Q6600 so I do 
the best I can with what I *can* afford. My NZ$220 E4500 CPU is running at 
the same speed as an NZ$1,500 X6800. The only difference is the latter has 
more L2 cache.

What are the
temperatures of the rig when you're not overclocking it?

About 12�C less. However, I'm considering a new cooler. A Thermaltake "Big 
Typhoon". It should drop it another 10�C maybe.

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.

Yes, I used to run it on multiple systems too.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/hosts_user.php?show_all=1&sort=rpc_time

(Hmm, don't know if that link will work. User name ~misfit~ [of course], 
show all computers)

However, money...

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...

Yeah, all too complicated. BOINC provides a way of choosing how much CPU to 
dedicate to crunching, I just think that the method implimented could be 
detrimental to CPUs.

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.

Yes, I can do that. I've tried it. However, I read out the temps of the two 
different cores and there is such a temp gradient between the two I worry 
about thermal expansion on one side of the die only. It can't be good to 
have one side of an extremely complex thing 20�C hotter than the other side 
when it's only 10mm across.

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. :)

Not major, no. However, it's all the little bits that add up.

Anyway, I don't think my system does either (Q6600, non overlocked),

Nice, that's what I would have liked. Although, of course, I'd overclock it. 
<g>

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. ;)

Yes, my Core2 Duo was just piling up the WUs in the week or so that I ran 
it.

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.

I like BOINC too. Except for that one thing that stops me from using it.....

Regards,
-- 
Shaun.