I decided to start this topic to help other new SETI@home crunchers to find add-on's and such .... These are my favourites, not necessarily the best there are. Feel free to add yours to this topic!
SETI spy reports on your progress, expected time of completion and all sort of other info. My favourite feature of SETIspy is that it can report to you your instantaneous Processing speed (approx. MegaFlops/s, % completion/hr and processor effiency). I find this feature is extremely useful when I am tweaking my system trying to find the optimal settings for SETI (no need to let it run a few WU for a day or so to see if your tweak actually speed things up).
For all of you K7 folks, I heard (but I forgot where ... maybe the CPU forum) that the K7 (dunno about K6's) runs faster on the i486-nonintel-winnt-cmdline.exe:
I haven't tried this (as I don't have an AMD CPU, and I hope that's the right one ... Manchupo, help me out here!), but Manchupo tried this and had positive results. Have fun!
I am not sure about that i486-nonintel version...
I ran 4 WUs, two on i386 v2.0 and two on the i486 version...:
i386 v2.0 avg = 5:54hrs
i486 v2.0 avg = 7:08hrs
I am not convinced. However, I have crunched only 2 WUs with it - and some take longer than others... but this much discrepancy is unlikely to be caused by difficult WUs. They both took ~7hrs, it wasnt a case of one of them taking 9hrs.
The Machine was idle when crunching.
No user logged on, no background services running.
It does, however, work better on my K6-2, a 7% gain in performance.
I have all my machines running 6 SETI Sessions one after the other (I cache WUs in case I loose my connection, SETI goes down, etc) and will run 3 using the i486-nonintel and 3 using the i386 and post some results after doing ~15 WUs.
WOW, that's a big difference (in a very very bad way). Can others post their result too? I am only passing on info that I have heard from others ... I hope I am not passing bad info (I hate it when I do that! ARRRRRGH). Thanks for your effort to clarify this, Tiberia!
[This message has been edited by NiteOwl (edited 03-06-2000).]
Well, dont forget I checked the performance under very specific conditions - maybe the i486 versions takes much less performance hits when your PC is active as the architecture for K6 and K7 is, form the logic of the design, better at it.
When I am using my machine, I get times of 7:30 hrs per WU.
hey tiberia... when i used the i486 version, this is what i got:
7hr. 14min. at 666 mhz
as opposed to the i386 version times:
7hr. 25min. at 880 mhz
i haven't tried clocking the proc back to 880, cause of the recent passing off this mortal coil of a very expensive friend of mine (the v3 3500 tv). hopefully he'll want to bake under a lamp for a day and come back to us.
on another news front, a nicer waterjacket comes in the mail sometime soon (i ordered it last friday, as in 10 days ago... so much for 24-48 hrs. shipping) from 3dcool.com ~ sorry... just another side note... you know... i've realized that 3dcool.com has a major problem with getting shipments out on time... wtf is wrong?!?!?! you just reach over, behind your desk grab the part off the shelf, print out a mailing label, slap it on a box with my things and mail it.... if you don't have the part in stock... write me an e-mail.... jeeeeez!
anyways, where was i? oh yeah, so that nice, new waterjacket should be here soon... i've got drool coming out of the side of my mouth i'm anticipating it so much
Wow - I am running my machine at 749Mhz (Using GFD to 700, then FSB 107Mhz) and my times are like 5:50h/WU (13WU avg).
Your times are way higher than mine even though you are at 880Mhz...maybe the i486 commandline does soemthing for you because some setting is slowing down the rate at which SETI can move data around and process it.
This is interesting though, because I know a few people with Athlons now who get really bad times...I think that 5:50 for 749Mhz is good. I need a higher FSB tho, I dont improve my times so much by upping CPU over 700Mhz - between 700Mhz and 810Mhz I see a gain that is less than 10%.
Does anyone know of an Athlon board that will take really high FSB (~150Mhz)?
In anycase, I will sit and wait for 266Mhz DDR RAM and see if those things will hit ~300Mhz. SETI will fly on something like that - because then you are entering the same kind of data through-put rates that RISC systems have (which is why SETI on a G450Mhz Mac kicks a PCs ***).
Btw, at 880Mhz your L2 is at 2/5, right?
I set my L2 to 2/5 and 1/3 once (running at 672Mhz) and my SETI times went to hell. SETI needs fast RAM and data throughput, otherwise the CPU gets starved.
LawnDawg, so you are Piccolo! Welcome to the team again! Did you noticed I live in Markham? BTW, Dragonballs (on YTV) stopped looping and they are showing "new" episdoes as of halfway through last week (I think).
[This message has been edited by NiteOwl (edited 03-06-2000).]
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