Somewhere on the interweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

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. ;)

Indeed.

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,

Ahh, but I'm not. I said that it doesn't get *too* hot. 60�C is fine as far 
as Intel are concerned. The spec on this CPU is up to 85. Once it hits 85 it 
throttles itself to just over 50% speed. If it goes further, to 90, it turns 
itself off. You can't damage an Intel CPU by heat alone, they are protected. 
Doubly so, TM1 and TM2 as described above.

and you're
the one contemplating it might damage your CPU.

I have absolutely no fears of the overclock damaging my CPU, What concerns 
me is the way SETI/BOINC keeps going from 100% to 0% and back again if set 
to less than 100% in preferences (the default is 80% BTW).

So are you really
really sure you know what you're doing, and the risk you're running?

Absolutely! As I said, I monitor my CPU's every tick. Only SETI/BOINC goes 
100% - 0% in a second and causes this rapid heating/cooling behaviour. No 
other programme or application behaves inthe same way, at least not that 
I've run.

I got myself a G0 Q6600, not because it can be overclocked better, but
because I read it ran cooler, and consumed less power.

The G0 stepping only runs cooler and consumes less power (perhaps with 80% 
of samples) when overclocked. At stock, without BIOS tweaks, it runs to the 
Intel hard-coded specs which are the same for all steppings of the Q6600. 
Same vcore = same heatoutput. Energy in = energy out.

I've also seen
some overclocking results, and I don't really think it's worth it.

Aye. OC'ing is not for everyone. However, you have a CPU that could quite 
easilly run at 3.2GHz with the only added expense being a better than stock 
cooler (assuming you have good case ventilation). As you're running BOINC at 
100% then you wouldn't experience the issues that are worrying me.

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.

Sure, fair enough. To be honest I have no need of more power than my CPU 
gave at stock speed. My main reason for OC'ing was to be able to do more 
work for SETI, while still having power to spare.

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...

Indeed.

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.

Yes, after pasting the URL I realsied that it was probably using a local 
cookie to take me to the page.

I started a team in my local computer usenet group which, at it's height, 
had 50+ members. However, on changing to BOINC, a lot of the folks dropped 
out.

You can find mine too, using
'Patrick Vervoorn', but I have hidden my computers, so there's not
much to see there.

Indeed. You've certainly crunched some units, with a lot of RAC. That's a 
fast machine. :-)

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

Yeah, within around a month of them starting up. That's how long it took for 
me to find out, via my local monthly computer magazine.

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)?

I have games that, when I exit them and look at the CPU usage graphs for 
both cores, show fairly consistent usage of CPU, a smooth line with maybe 
+/- 10% of the CPU being used. Baseline varying from game to game. Nothing 
like the saw-tooth graph I see from SETI/BOINC.

What does
that same option do on a machine running Linux, for instance?

Other than once a few years back I've not tried Linux. Perhaps it's time I 
gave it another go. I keep downloading ISOs...

You
should have some spare hardware around you could try this on, I
suppose? :)

LOL! That's an understatement. I have <looks around> 9 PCs in this room 
alone that are ready to run. All over 1GHz CPU, a lot of them Tualatin 
Celerons, others AMD Athlons. I must get around to getting rid of some. The 
trouble is, nobody wants to pay any money for them, with new, low-end 
HP/Compaq/Dell machines being so cheap. Yet they're still excellent internet 
appliances, in fact far more powerful than that. I hate to see good working 
machines scrapped. (I built most of these from parts that my friends in IT 
gave me, parts destined for the scrap-heap.)

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.

That is a trait of mine. Especially when I'm not easilly able to replace the 
thing about which I'm worrying.

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

No, I considered that and ran it back at stock speed for a while. The thing 
behaved the same, albeit at slightly lower temperatures. The fluctuations, 
which are my main worry, still occured at a rate I found disturbing. I 
haven't raised the core voltage at all to reach this speed so it's not what 
you'd call an extreme overclock by any means.

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?

Well, you have all the power that you could need, both CPU and graphics 
already.

Coincidently, an 8800GTX is sitting on the chair next to me, in it's box 
with a NZ$920 sticker on it. I'm doing a re-build for a friend this weekend, 
his system has to go into a new case as the 8800GTX is a full-length card 
and won't fit his existing case. For doing this for him he's giving me his 
"old" 7800GT (I get a lot of my hardware this way, in payment for 
building/upgrading machines for gaming friends).

The 7800GT presented a problem for me, as my motherboard is AGP/DDR, not a 
PCI-e slot in sight. Consequently I've maxed out the credit card again (just 
as I was getting it down a bit) and have ordered an ASUSTek P5K-E/WiFi-AP 
mobo with the P35/ICH9 chipset (should arrive today hopefully) and 2 x 1GB 
DDR2 800 RAM (arrived yesterday). I guess I could have just sold the 7800GT 
but it's twice as powerful as my existing card (7600GS) and I need to take 
these opportunities to upgrade when I can.

I'm confident that I can recoup more than 50% of the expenditure by selling 
my "old" motherboard, 2 x 1GB DDR 400 RAM and 7600GS. My flatmate has 
expressed an interest.

Gosh but I'm good at digression huh?

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'. ;)

LOL!!! I set my E4500 to 2 days with 0.25 days cache and had more than 40 
tasks in waiting (I didn't count them). When I decided to stop (for a while 
at least) I reduced it to 0/0 and allowed it to crunch all but the last one 
before stopping so that they didn't have to send them out yet again.

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

Here's hoping you can solve it.

Thanks Patrick,

Cheers,
-- 
Shaun.