Hi all,

First thread here - and I am glad to be here too! I have been crunching SETI for about 4 years I think, and Climate Prediction too for a while, and now I have joined Rosetta.

However, I am about to upgrade my PC. From the CPDN Forum, I was told to "suspend" my WU's, and re-instigate them after the new PC is put together.

I want to go for a dual-core AMD X2 4400+ CPU with about 2 or maybe 4Gb RAM all plonked onto a nice Asus A8N-SLI-Premium motherboard.

Currently, i run an old Intel P4 2.8GHz (with no HT) on an even older 845 chipset based mobo!!! HUH

Can anyone see any problems doing this? My plan is to simply rip out my mobo/CPU/RAM/gfx card and stick in the new stuff using the same HDs. People on SETI reckon I should re-install XP too on a clean, formatted drive. (That's always good, but it is necessary really?)

Also, does Rosetta utilise AMD X2 better than Intel 800/900 Series dual core CPUs?

Any thoughts?

Best wishes,

Neil.

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you're forgetting something very important. a NEW "Quality" power supply. You're powering two cpus now. The old one "might" be ok as long as you don't reuse any of the hard drives, or CD/dvd roms. LOL I'd go for atleast a 450 Watt. When I put a 450 in my A8N-E board, pared with an AMD64 3700 and called tech support, they asked what size PSU, I told them 450 and he hemmed and hawed like it might not be enough. Go with Quality not value, Enermax has been OK for me. If your powering more than one cd/dvd, or multiple drives, go for 500 or better. If you plan to OC, bigger is better, heck in all things, bigger is better.

If this is a dedicated cruncher, installing windowsxp from scratch would be the most reliable solution.
If there's lots of other things you've installed on the system that will take forever to reinstall and configure, then moving the drives to the new system and performing a repair installation of WinXP (boot off cd, choose install, select the installation of windows, and choose Repair.)
It'll help if you boot up in safemode, and delete all the hardware. Then shut the system down, and then move the drives to the new motherboard - so you only have one set of hardware known about.
After the repair installation, you'll have to perform all the windows updates that came after your WinXP cd version (original, sp1, sp2)- and it'll want to contact M$ again to get authorized.

My stock 2Ghz 754pin Athlon 3000+ gets 255 points a day (or whatever my RAC is on this post) - with stock Boinc/Rosetta clients. And that should be equivalent to one core of a Athlon x2 3800+. Perhaps we can get actual values from an x2 4400+ user, and from the Intel dual core users running the normal Boinc/Rosetta clients. (It should get better than 563 RAC from Rosetta).

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you're forgetting something very important. a NEW "Quality" power supply. You're powering two cpus now. The old one "might" be ok as long as you don't reuse any of the hard drives, or CD/dvd roms. LOL I'd go for atleast a 450 Watt. When I put a 450 in my A8N-E board, pared with an AMD64 3700 and called tech support, they asked what size PSU, I told them 450 and he hemmed and hawed like it might not be enough. Go with Quality not value, Enermax has been OK for me. If your powering more than one cd/dvd, or multiple drives, go for 500 or better. If you plan to OC, bigger is better, heck in all things, bigger is better.

I disagree. An oversized power supply is the most common error when building a PC (and costs money and damages the environment). The AMD 64 X2 with two CPUs will not consume more power then the old Pentium 4. I've build AMD-Dual-Core-CPUs with 350 power supply without any problems. The CPU will consume not more than 50-60 Watt and with insane overclocking perhaps 90 Watt. Even with a demanding graphic card 350 Watt power supply will be enough.

Have you ever measured how much your comp uses and how much your PS is used?

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strangely enough I have measured the current draw from the primary side of the power supply. you can read the full thread here. This is what what is said in that post:


In light of the current conversation between Administrator and others, I've dredged this thread up from 452 days ago.

Earlier in this thread stated:

Message 63208 - Posted 12 Jan 2005 3:32:14 UTC
Last modified: 12 Jan 2005 3:38:35 UTC
OK, I went and did it. I placed my multimeter in series with the cord and as expected the "Clamp On" ammeter wasn't very accurate at that low of a current draw.

This puter drew from 830-912 mA (milliamps) from Bios load to the completion of windows loading. I shut down Boinc and it dropped to between 630-655 mA. This represents a delta (difference) of 228.5 mA (avg)or 27.83 watts.

I'll start boinc. Yep it again went back up to 884mA. It is consistent.

So, running this puter with Boinc ON costs (871mA [avg] x 121.8 Vac= 106 watts) 106 watts/1000 x .08cents=.00848 dollars/hour or .848 cents/hour. .848 x 24 = 20.352 cents/day or $6.11 a month.

I could save .22264 cents/hour, 5.34 cents/day, or $1.60 /month. heck, If this puter wasn't crunching Boinc work I could just shut it off and save the big $6.10/month.

Now these are accurate figures (unless I made a math mistake) and can be used for other purposes.

Now for my own curiosity, I've done the same to all my puters and here's what I found out:

AMD 64 3700 Sandiego, Asus A8N-E mobo, Enermax 450W psu, Asus 6200 PCI express video card, 1M OCZ gold ram, OCed.

With boinc running 1120mA max, 1024 mA min, 1043 mA average (125.16 Watts)
W/O boinc running 888mA max, 704 mA min, 704 mA aversage (84.48 Watts)
This machine costs 1.25 Cents/hour, 30.04 Cents/day, and $9.01/month.

Gateway laptop, AMD 64 3700 754 socket, 1 M ram

With boinc running 1200mA max, 752 mA min, 1157mA avgerage (138.84 Watts)
W/O boinc running 496mA max, 416mA min, 440mA average (52.8 Watts)
This machine costs 1.39 Cents/hour, 33.32 Cents/day, and $9.9965/month.

HP 760n, P4 1.8, 512M ram, crappy Asus board

With boinc running 1680mA max, 1472 mA min, 1597 mA average (191.64 Watts)
W/O boinc running 1016 mA max, 928mA min, 949mA average (113.88 Watts)
This machine costs 1.92 Cents/hour, 45.99 Cents/day, and $13.798/month.

HP 6545c, Celeron 500, 256M ram

With boinc running 688mA max, 640mA min, 672mA average (80.64 Watts)
W/O boinc running 648mA max, 448mA min, 460mA average (55.2 Watts)
This machine costs .8064 Cents/hour, 19.35 Cents/day, and $5.806/month.

conditions
All measurements taken with Fluke 87 multimeter place in series with the power cord to the puter.
All monitors powered seperately.
Measurement sample period 2-3 minutes of record time after allowing some "settle" time after turning off boinc, or after starting boinc.
Each sample repeated and all results similar to those listed, so I went with the higher Max sample on each reported result.
Monthly rate calculated with 30 days/month.
All rates calculated at 10 cents/KWh.

Now these figures only show actual power draw for the whole system, and do not detail individual components contribution to total watts. Also when reading the term "total watts" you need to careful to take into consideration whether thats wattage at line voltage (120v in this case) or wattage at the load (the actual device).

If you undersize by even 1 watt, your PSU can be destroyed and that error can take other down stream devices with it. Now, there is little bad that can happen from oversizing. If your downstream devices don't need the power, they won't draw the power. Now ofcourse you can go overboard, but do do so would cost hundreds of dollars. I'm recommending you get atleast an 85$ unit. I don't mean for you to go out and spend $400 which you could do.

PS most PSU wattage rating are for watts OUT, not watts in.

tony

ASUS Computer international
tech support
1-502-995-0883 (inside US)

PS most PSU wattage rating are for watts OUT, not watts in.

That's correct. However, PS have lower efficiency when running at low power output. Throwing a higher rated PS would make it work with lower efficiency, thus wasting electricity.

At least this is my hunch, but data would be welcome.

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I am running Rosetta on a AMD X2 4400+ and using a 350 watt power supply and I have never had any problems. It is also my main computer and I do lots of Video Encoding and have a 300GB Seagate SATA drive, a 250GB Seagate SATA drive and a 250GB Western Digital SATA drive connected to it, also 2 X 1GB Dual Channel Ram, and a BFG 6800GT OC 256MB PCIE card and I can overclock stably at 2.4 GHZ and my RAC typically runs around 1300-1400 and I can cool it using 2 60mm fans pushing air in and a 90mm pulling air out. So I suppose a huge power supply is not always necessary. My motherboard is a MSI K8n NEO4-F. I simply love the dual core AMD it can handle everything I have thrown at it so far, and I love to multi-task.

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Team mauisun.org

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Team mauisun.org

Hi

Well thanks to all the replies. As with most forums, the answers very quickly stray from the original question.

I asked about problems upgrading my mobo/CPU whilst using BOINC and all of the answers seemed to concentrate on my PSU?!?!? For your information, I have a perfectly good CPU for my level of PC. I am not an extreme gamer so do not have dual SLI gfx cards or 4 RAID5 HDs in my box.. It's an Akasa Silent 480W ATX2 model with a nice 120mm silent fan.

Anyway - thanks to BennyRop who did read my original post and has really scared me. Why are PCs so difficult to upgrade??? All I need is a faster PC, and I NEED dual-core (Intel or AMD) as my PC not only runs BOINC, but also Audio/Video software which loves duallies!!!
It looks like I need to add a new fast SATA2 HD to my shopping list and to install a fresh copy of XP onto it for best results.....but I am 500 hours into a CPDN model. How do I capture this and carry on where I left off......?? (I also run SETI and Rosetta, but those mosels are smaller)

Cheers,

Neil.

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Hi

Well thanks to all the replies. As with most forums, the answers very quickly stray from the original question.

I asked about problems upgrading my mobo/CPU whilst using BOINC and all of the answers seemed to concentrate on my PSU?!?!? For your information, I have a perfectly good CPU for my level of PC. I am not an extreme gamer so do not have dual SLI gfx cards or 4 RAID5 HDs in my box.. It's an Akasa Silent 480W ATX2 model with a nice 120mm silent fan.

Anyway - thanks to BennyRop who did read my original post and has really scared me. Why are PCs so difficult to upgrade??? All I need is a faster PC, and I NEED dual-core (Intel or AMD) as my PC not only runs BOINC, but also Audio/Video software which loves duallies!!!
It looks like I need to add a new fast SATA2 HD to my shopping list and to install a fresh copy of XP onto it for best results.....but I am 500 hours into a CPDN model. How do I capture this and carry on where I left off......?? (I also run SETI and Rosetta, but those mosels are smaller)

Cheers,

Neil.

- First the post is Intel vs AMD ?
and
- in the post, asks really about hardware problems (or at least reads like that)

People where only trying to tell you the problems and since you only mentioned replacing the motherboard and CPU and maybe increasing the RAM, nothing actually asks of problems with BOINC (other than any more advise other than suspend and restart).
PSU, different Graphics card interface are all valid problems you can come across (though the detail of the PSU info was good old forum chat ;-)

Anyways,
I would close boinc (no real need to suspend). Make a copy of the BOINC directory. Once you have installed WindowsXP on your new setup, copy BOINC directory back again, THEN run the BOINC installation (5.4.9 at the moment), iIt'll either just install or ask you if you want to repair, either way say yes :-)
Then continue start boinc up.
That [should] work without loosing anything.
(If you do loose anything then copy the boinc directory over again...)

It should be possible to do it without a fresh install of winodows*, but from experience of doing that with WinXP it's ok if your using the same family of motherboard chipset (e.g. Moving from VIA KT133 to VIA KT600, though problems still crop up later when you least want them to) but since it's a whole CPU/motherboard chipset changeover, I wouldn't bet on it.

But BOINC shouldn't have a problem,
it'll start, you may want to run a benchamrk if it hasn't already then hit update to tranfer the details of the setup to the website (though not needed sicne it'll go on next communication)


*Either by just putting the hardrive in and booting up or by the hardware profile deselecting method, though SATA, SCSI and proprietry IDE-RAID are a bugger doing this.

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Team mauisun.org