Zxian

Hello everyone, I was hoping that our more artistically talented friends around here could help out with making a signature bar for the MSFN Rosetta@Home team. For more information on the team (and if you're interested in joining) - read here. I would like to have an official MSFN Rosetta@Home Team 300x20 userbar that team members can have in their signature. If anyone has a bit of free time and would like to contribute, please show us your best! Cheers, -Zxian

The task length is set in your preferences for R@H. A task can run for as short as 1 hour, or as long as 24 hours. I've currently got my top computers running for 12 hour tasks, and the less powerful ones are set to 6 hours. EDIT - If anyone with decent Photoshop skills would like to contribute, here's a thread for a signature bar for the MSFN R@H Team.

Thread dealt with and moved back to it's original location. The report button is a better way to notify us of this kind of problem in future.

Bingo. That's been the cause of your problems. LBA support was only added after Service Pack 1. If you want to avoid this problem in the future, you can follow the guides on this site to integrate SP2 into your installation CD. Now that you've got SP2 installed, check out Disk Management to see if your computer recognizes the extra space now. Right-click on My Computer and select Manage. In the left hand side, click on Disk Management. You should see your disk there with a single partition of about 137GB. You can create a new partition in the empty space from here. If you want to expand the current partition, you'll need to find a third party disk management program to do that for you. Otherwise, you can slipstream SP2 and start from scratch.

Yea... laptops suck for crunching R@H... I stopped running mine, since it was only on for a few hours each day. As for school.... you could talk to the sysadmins about this. Depending on how strict they are, they might allow it, as long as you tell them that it's for a non-profit group, and doesn't affect overall system performance.

@Idontwantspam - Why not use your main computer? You think I built this system just for crunching Rosetta work units? I've got my file server, my home workstation, and my university workstation (the new E2160 machine) all crunching for me. My ex's home computer is also running R@H, but I don't think she knows... oh well. I suppose I could sticky this... I was also going to ask if anyone wanted to try to make an official MSFN Rosetta@Home team banner - you know, one of those 300x20 signature bars. Any takers?

You're right about Terminal Services not being really ideal for this kind of application. Have you contacted Adobe to see if they have a server-type application?

@bonestonne - It's not a limitation of XP Home. The only version of Windows that has a disk size limit is the XP Starter Edition. @ButchN - What service pack are you running? The 137GB barrier is one found on Windows XP with no service packs installed. Make sure you're running Service Pack 2 on that machine. What does Disk Management say for the disk size?

@clidx - Keep that beast running! You have the potential to jump to the #2 spot with that one system alone! My RAC is at 1330 right now, and it's on the rise. I'm hoping that I'll hit 1500 before it levels out. I've got another E2160 system that's going to start crunching soon (hopefully tomorrow). That'll be another 500 RAC machine at least (my current E2160 cruncher hit 520 before the project's SAN failure).

Your current system isn't all too bad. Sure it's not "top of the line" by today's standards, but it's no slouch either. The only thing that's missing from that setup is a P4D CPU, and you'd be almost back in the ball game. As for buying parts over time... I wouldn't. I'd suggest saving your money as you collect it and putting it away into a "new computer fund" (or big piggy bank... I've got one of those ). Make yourself a list of the parts that you want to get, and then buy them all at once. If you buy multiple parts from the same store, you can also save on shipping.

Err... I think you misread my post. I'm not saying that Vista or *nix systems are bloat - I'm saying they're smart about memory management. Your comment about XP and OEM XP... there's no difference between the two! They're the exact same underlying system. The only difference between the two is licencing. XP comes with a small handful of tools that helps you maintain your system (there are some better third party tools, but let's not go there). I really don't see what's so "bloat" about Windows, nor have I ever understood the definition of "bloat", since people keep talking about different things (memory usage and management, bundled programs/files... etc). OpenSuSe is only "very heavy" because of all the additional programs that they bundle with it. Pretty much all BSD systems I've tried so far drop you into a console on first boot.

Most of those parts look alright... except the motherboard. I wouldn't put that much money into a MSI board considering all the other great parts you've got. If you want the SLI support, I'd suggest the ASUS P5N32-E. It's cheaper and a far better brand than MSI.

Like ripken said... we can't force you not to buy it - you mentioned that you were, and we gave you our opinions. That's all. No harm if you want to be the geekiest person in your school - I know for a fact that I am. I'm the only one that I know of in my department who has over 1TB of storage at home. And of course... if you've got three monitors, you'll need the second video card, but you can't run them in SLI then.

Right now I'm at stock voltages. I'll see how far I can go on stock voltages before things get unstable.

Future stuff I will be doing = what exactly? I honestly can't see too many applications where you need more than one video card. @ripken - I'll see if I can go up to 3 or 3.2 this weekend. I know someone else over at SPCR who managed to get 3.2 with the Ultra120 and have temps stay below 60C. 8x400 is looking mightly appealing....

If you don't game... the SLI will be a waste of money. As for the Raptor discussion... see here. vegetto didn't seem to follow most people's advice, but hopefully you'll see the light. The motherboard doesn't control the multiplier - the CPU does. The Q6600 has an unlocked multiplier between 6x and 9x. This lets you push up the FSB and lower the multi to get a "perfect" overclock.

So... my I built my workstation a little while back, built around the Intel Q6600 CPU. I wanted to have it as cool as possible, while still being quiet. The Ultra120 Extreme is the best heatsink tested over at SPCR, so I picked up one of those for the system. With a Scythe S-Flex E fan running at about 9V, my highest temperatures are about 52C while running Prime95 v25.4 with small FFTs. (This is a 2.7GHz overclock... minor, but still overclocked) I had picked up an EVGA 8600GT OC video card, and used the stock cooler up until last night. I wanted some beefier cooling on the card, since temps went up to about 75C at load. Again... ThermalRight to the rescue with the HR-03. I had a bit of a conundrum with installation though - if I followed the instructions, the heatsink interfered with components on my motherboard. With the heatsink above the card, it would hit the northbridge heatsink. With the heatsink below the card, the retension nuts hit one of the capacitors on the motherboard. After reversing the bolts and the nuts on the heatsink clip, I was able to make it fit (pictures will come later - it was late last night). I decided to test this thing passively, since I figured that I could add a fan later if needed. The results... Idle temperature: 49C (previously 52C) Load temperature: 60C (previously 72-75C) I loaded the GPU using rthdribl. This lets you stress the heck out of your GPU, while still remaining in Windows to monitor fan speeds and temperatures. Remember... these temperatures are with a passive heatsink! I'm quite impressed....

Intel Quad all the way. I've got my Q6600 up to 2.7GHz right now without any hiccups or problems. I think ripken pushed his to 3.0GHz the other day. The Gigabyte board seems to have good overall reviews. I'd pick the DS3R over the DS3, but that's just me.

It is now...

The E2100 series have 1MB total of L2 cache. The E4000 series have 2MB of L2, and the E6000 series have 2MB or 4MB depending on the exact processor model. I believe the E6X20 and E6X50 have 4MB, but the E6X00 have 2MB. The quad-core processors all have 4MB of L2 cache total. This is not per core. In the end, that extra 1MB of cache is shown to only provide a 5-10% performance boost, so the extra price premium isn't really worth it (since that's all you pay for between the E2180 and the E4400). Hope this helps.

That's a matter of opinion. I've heard all kinds of explanations about why XP is "bloat" and why Vista is even worse "bloat", but you guys should take a look at every *nix based OS out there. If you have a look at the free memory after a few days use, it's usually below 50MB, regardless of the installed RAM. It's because those operating systems cache pretty much everything. XP runs very well on pretty much all hardware - even that which is 6 or 7 years old (remember - that's the generation of computers that was around when XP was released). I'd like to see any "modern" distro of Linux handle a system of those specs as well (I've tried most - they don't).

File and printer sharing isn't that heavy work, so most of the time, it'd be crunching numbers. If it's already running, set R@H to run on that sucker. Every little bit helps. You'd have to appease your parents because... of the electrical bill? I really think they should only be concerned about that if they're the type to turn off everything and all the lights (my parents are). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving electricity where I can, but at the current cost of electricity and considering how much I spend on other things, the additional electricity is really a minimal hit on my budget. I'm just hoping they fix one of the problems in their bloody work units... it keeps crapping out on me, and then giving me a dinky 20 credits regardless of how much work the system has actually done (claims 200, gets 20 - that kinda thing).

You can see from SpeedFan that he's at about 50% load.

CoreTemp is showing you your correct temperatures. There are two thermal sensors in the C2D/C2Q chips - one that's buried inside the CPU itself, and one that's closer to the IHS. SpeedFan picks up on the "external" temperature, while CoreTemp and Intel's TAT pick up on the "internal" temperature. I haven't been able to get TAT running on my system at home though. CoreTemp works fine for me though. If you want to put the most stress on the CPU, run Prime95 v25.4 with small FFTs. It'll put the most thermal load on your system so you can get a proper reading of your load temps.

The E6600 will kick the pants of the P4D chip. Any day, any program.