4 is better than 2

Now crunching WU's with four machines instead of two. Can you tell the difference? ;) I'm also over 200,000 points. My goal is 500,000+ before Christmas.

Crunchers

I now have four computers crunching work units for the World Community Grid. Helps keep me warm on a cold night. ;)

The system you see above is my old AOpen i975Xa and Yonah T2600 combo that I've put to work again. I usually do testing outside the case first. The AOpen board is now in a case and crunching away.

Shopping

I have never understood the Day After Thanksgiving shopping frenzy. People are willing to wait in line overnight, then risk getting trampled when the doors open, just for the chance to buy a cheap plasma TV or a junky laptop? The whole ritual seems very degrading to me. The stores are largely to blame. I observed the same phenomenon in England the year I was living there. There's nothing wrong with bargain hunting. But Black Friday mania seems to bring out the worst in people.

Milestone

I've surpassed 100,000 points on the World Community Grid, a modest achievement compared to what others have done. I now have two computers folding, including my eVGA 680i/X6800 combo. The X6800 is great at crunching workunits.

I have a lot of spare parts and plan to put more machines into folding service. The biggest negative, as many will tell you, is the heat generated by numerous computers. My computer room will stay nice and warm this winter. Even my cat hangs out in the room more often now. Cats generally can find the warmest place in the house.

eVGA 680i & Corsair 6400C3

My Corsair 6400C3's are performing very well with the eVGA board and the latest bios (P20). DDR2-925 (462.5MHz) @ 3-3-3-9 is Orthos-stable.

Orthos @ DDR2-1308

The latest bios (P20) has allowed me to run Orthos at DDR2-1300+. Using Corsair 6400C3's at 2.5v.

Orthos @ 465FSB

The P20 bios allows for higher FSB. So far, the eVGA board has been rock-solid for me. It is not fast in Pi, but it does everything else very well. And it's fun to overclock memory well beyond DDR2-1200.

DDR2-1333

I've managed to push memory clocks up to DDR2-1333 @ 5-5-5. VDimm at 2.5 which is the board's max. I would not recommended running at that memory speed long-term. OS corruption seems to occur after DDR2-1315. At least that's been my experience.

I ran Orthos for 30 minutes last night at DDR2-1287 before system froze up.

Orthos-stable at DDR2-1271

Been running Orthos stability tests. The eVGA 680i is sensational when it comes to memory overclocking. So far, I'm Orthos-stable at DDR2-1271 (635MHz).

DDR2-1312

As I mentioned earlier, memory can be run independent of FSB on the eVGA 680i. I've been able to hit DDR2-1312 (656MHz) so far.

FSB with the shipping BIOS is limited to around 450. The cursor goes crazy when using a PS/2 mouse. Use USB. CPU-Z 1.37 does not read the memory timings on this board. Also, there are no Windows overclocking utilities except nTune.

1T vs. 2T

Running 1T command rate does make a difference. First result was done 2T. The one below it is 1T. FSB & memory speeds remained the same. Only command rate was changed.

680i stability

The eVGA 680i can run 1T command rate. 400MHz gets a little squirrely at 1T. But 340-350 is no problem.

eVGA 680i

I'm testing the eVGA 680i board. It's much different than the Intel 965 and 975X boards. The BIOS allows you to clock the FSB and memory independently of each other. It takes some getting used to because the BIOS is configured much differently than the Asus boards.

Linux vs. Windows

Linux has come a long way in a very short time. It's so enjoyable using an operating system that didn't cost me a cent, except for the cost of burning a downloaded ISO onto a DVD. But having said that, I don't think I'm ready to completely abandon Windows. Linux, for example, does not support my X-Fi card, which is a shame. Also, there are programs that work better in Windows. You get credit for more folding points in Windows than in Linux. I'm told the folding project in which I'm participating (World Community Grid) is beta testing a new scoring system that will offer more fairness to Linux users.

I've created a dual boot system, so it's easy to switch back and forth between Windows and Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu (6.10) makes it very easy to create a dual-boot. All you need is some unallocated space on your HDD. No need to manually create a swap file. The installation program does it for you.

Folding

I've decided to give folding another try. It's more useful than some of the other things I do on the computer. The BOINC program allows me to take full advantage of my dual-core Opterton. I can run two tasks at once. Just using one machine at the moment. May add several more in the future.