I went and found a pentium 4 1.4ghz at a flea market.
Paid 50$ for it, not to bad if you ask me. Got it home and instantly install archlinux on it. All seems good linux even starts up and runs better then my AMD XP at 1.7ghz. Now I isntalled boinc and attached rosetta and the benchmarks rate this cpu well below that of my 733mhz intel that is crunching rosetta at a very good rate for how old it is.

Now this being my first pentium 4 has any one else seen or heard of pentiums performing badly?

p1.4ghz
256mb ram
20gig hdd


oh yea my 400mhz laptop is very close in the cpu times as this machine.

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If your other machines are running Windows, and the new one is running Linux.. then the difference in benchmarks is due to the Linux client. (There's been mention of this in the past.)

If you're comparing two Linux machines - then the new p4 system may be throttling the clock speed down. Make sure the cpu fan is working, and remove the coating of dust on the fins of the heat sink. Make sure the heat sink is making contact. (Perhaps it's time to replace the thermal paste between the HSF and the cpu).

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The "standard" (from Berkeley University) executable of BOINC for Linux benchmarks at roughly 50% of the speed, than BOINC for Win does (i.e. both running on the exact same hardware).

So the credit claims (handled by BOINC for most projects) are much less, although Rosetta science application itself does the same amount of real work for Rosetta@home (probably even more under Linux).

The above facts are for BOINC v5.2.13, I don't know if the new BOINC v5.4.9 has fixed this problem, otherwise you could use one of the alternative BOINC clients for Linux from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_other.php (or compile it yourself).

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Best UFO Resources
Wikipedia R@h
How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity