In article <4730688e@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfit61nz@yahooligans.co.nz> wrote:

Somewhere on the interweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

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.

Sometimes things are very black and white, sometimes they're not. ;)

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.

You're the one complaining about heat due to overclocking, and you're the 
one contemplating it might damage your CPU. So are you really really sure 
you know what you're doing, and the risk you're running?

I got myself a G0 Q6600, not because it can be overclocked better, but 
because I read it ran cooler, and consumed less power. I've also seen some 
overclocking results, and I don't really think it's worth it. For now, it 
runs what I want to run, as fast as I'd like it to run. If/when it runs 
out of steam, I'll see what I can gain by overclocking it's parts.

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.

The Extreme series Intel CPUs are ridiculously overpriced, but then, 
they're at the top of the 80/20 or 90/10 rule...

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)

The link didn't work, but by searching via the 'User search' option on the 
main page, I found your account. You can find mine too, using 'Patrick 
Vervoorn', but I have hidden my computers, so there's not much to see 
there.

Seems you joined Setiatome Classic about half a year before I did. ;)

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.

Perhaps they did the best they could using WinXP (Just speculation from my 
side, no idea if they could've done it better)? What does that same option 
do on a machine running Linux, for instance? You should have some spare 
hardware around you could try this on, I suppose? :)

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.

I think it's safe to assume Intel considered a single thread OS or just a 
single-threaded application running on these CPUs, so I think you're 
worrying too much.

Of course, if these extremes are happening because you overclock, I 
suppose all assumptions Intel made are out of the door. ;)

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>

I've got the means to overclock it quite nicely (an nVidia 680i based 
mainboard is underneath the CPU), but I have no incentive really. Same for 
the graphics card (8800GTX); plenty of options to overclock it, but why 
risk it?

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've set the Q6600 system to get 5.0 days of WU's and an additional cache 
of 4.0 days (a few too many too long outages which dried up my supply in 
the last several months lead me to set these perhaps a bit too high). The 
Q6600 has 306 'Tasks' 'in progress'. ;)

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

Here's hoping you can solve it.

Regards, Patrick.