Yay or nay?

This is under the sort of conditions when the CPU is being used for nothing BUT folding, except small amount of AV and anti spyware.

Its just my new 1.67ghz tower isn't making exceptional progress, and I wondered if the mere 256mb ram may be holding it back, and perhaps a 512mb chip wouldn't go amiss in it. And if a chip wouldn't go amiss in it, what sort of RAM is it? Its an Athlon 2000 - I think its 333 ram, but I'm not too clued up on modern PCs I'm afraid.

Go to www.crucial.com - select UK as your country and plug your motherboard details in - it'll tell you what RAM you can use, and how much it will be

You could go for their ballistix range if you want to empty your wallet (CL=2 on those, I think?)

Nay. Or at least not with most of the engines. If the hard disk light is flickering (constantly) during folding then yes, but I expect that the process is CPU-bound rather than memory-bound. To double check this, have a look at the proc. util. in task manager. If it's in the high 90's, then adding RAM won't help much.

HTH

Nay. Or at least not with most of the engines. If the hard disk light is flickering (constantly) during folding then yes' date=' but I expect that the process is CPU-bound rather than memory-bound. To double check this, have a look at the proc. util. in task manager. If it's in the high 90's, then adding RAM won't help much.

HTH[/quote']

Yeah, its usually flicking around 98% Right, won't bother then

Silly Q then? Is it easy to just bolt in a faster CPU to the existing setup? If its currently an Athlon at 1.67ghz, how easy might it be to say add in a Semprom 2600 Athlon CPU in? I can get them through work for

Do a bit of searching on your board, through Google, Jase. See what the max CPU you can use. Ideally swipe on from work (if you can) and see if it runs in your system.

Steve

No, it doesn't use much RAM. Here's a snapshot from my new PC; the FAH core is PID 7194. You can see that:-

- It only has 10MB permanently in core (under the RES column)

- It is only using 1.5% of 768MB (which is roughly the same as the resident set size above, give or take a bit of rounding)

- It's using as much processor time as it's allowed (89.7% ni - ni is "nice", in other words, the lowest priority). It is running with a priority of 39; in the Unix/Linux world, the higher the number, the lower the prority.

top - 06:36:06 up 1 day, 11:20,  3 users,  load average: 1.18, 1.36, 1.20
Tasks:  84 total,   2 running,  82 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  9.7% us,  0.7% sy, 89.7% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    711528k total,   594684k used,   116844k free,   106920k buffers
Swap:  1052248k total,        0k used,  1052248k free,   268748k cached

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
7194 mike      39  19 70728  10m  724 R 89.5  1.5   2068:15 FahCore_65.exe
5344 root      15   0  124m  48m 6196 S  7.7  7.0  28:50.71 Xorg
7070 mike      15   0 39560  15m 9484 S  2.3  2.2   0:08.59 gnome-terminal

Jason,

Be careful about sticking a Sempron in. Even if it will work on your board (not guaranteed) it may not be any quicker due to the following. Sempron is the AMD equivalent of INTEL's Celeron. It doesn't have as much internal cache as the Athlon processors. This means that the processor has to fetch data from normal (slower) RAM more often with the Sempron than the Athlon. Anything that is processor intensive will run better (subjective term) on a CPU with lots of lovely internal cache than on one with less.

Cheers

This means that the processor has to fetch data from normal (slower) RAM more often with the Sempron than the Athlon. Anything that is processor intensive will run better (subjective term) on a CPU with lots of lovely internal cache than on one with less.

Best chips for this sort of thing are the P4 Extreme Editions, which have 1MB L2 or 2Mb L3 cache, which makes them blindingly fast for number-crunching like this.

Not cheap though.

Rob.

Alternatively, accept what you have got and leave it to it - or are you going to blow

Thanks Mark.

I'm thinking of trying to find a 2.4ish CPU now. The board is a :

AMd XP 2000 processor in a LEX BN790E motherboard

(quoted) - I've been warned this is slightly dated, and won't take a big CPU, but if I find one on ebay? What would be the best CPU to try and look for it?

J - just overclock your current one

Chris

J - just overclock your current one

Chris

Wish I knew something about overclocking though.

J, you help need here

As Chris says, just overclock what you've got

Wish I knew something about overclocking though.

Plenty of info on t'interweb

http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=122

Chris

Looks interesting - so might be able to tweak up my 1.67, 1.8 and 750 athlons by around 10% - anyone else run their Athlons in a similar tuned up state? Is it fairly safe?

Just do it in small steps Jase, see how you get on. As you'll eventually get to a level where you may get some instability, machine crashing etc..

Depending on what Athlon model you have, some have more overclocking potential than others.

Your question is a bit like the 'is it safe to chip my car?' question. On the whole there's not a problem, but you may reduce the working life of some of the components in the process

Steve

I think I might start by fidding with the FSB thing mentioned in that link on the 1.67ghz AMD2000+ machine. If I can up that to 110 ish I'll be happy with just over 1.8ghz.

Then I'll try it on the Athlon 750, which is now running XP pro, and I don't really care about its long term future. That'll be abused viciously! I'm aiming for 1ghz out of it. (not)

Then if I am happy I'll try tweaking the 1.8ghz AMD2200+ machine to close to 2.0ghz.

Beyond changing the FSB figure in BIOS though, the "rest" of the overclocking stuff looking way beyond me... Especially anything that involves opening the case and fidding with the motherboard.

Threads like this make appreciate how incredibly thick I am when it comes to computers.It really is like a foreign tongue :(

Must confess, a lot of Briskoda I use to try and educate me computer wise by reading the threads and a lot of it does help.Sometimes though I think I am just a dunce when I try and understand things like this

I will persevere

I think I might start by fidding with the FSB thing mentioned in that link on the 1.67ghz AMD2000+ machine. If I can up that to 110 ish I'll be happy with just over 1.8ghz.

Pretty sure the 2000+ runs with an FSB of 133MHz, on a 12.5 multiplier. So don't set it to 110, otherwise you'l find it'll only run at 1.3GHz...

Beyond changing the FSB figure in BIOS though, the "rest" of the overclocking stuff looking way beyond me... Especially anything that involves opening the case and fidding with the motherboard.

Changing jumpers is easy...just like swapping a fuse out on a car, only scaled down. It's pretty hard to break anything permanently - worst case you just need to pop the battery out for 30 seconds. That said, I know quite a few people who've managed to destroy Athlons through overclocking...

Rob.

Pretty sure the 2000+ runs with an FSB of 133MHz' date=' on a 12.5 multiplier. So don't set it to 110, otherwise you'l find it'll only run at 1.3GHz...

Rob.[/quote']

yerwot? :confused: I'm with Laurence on this one. I thought the link said that this FSB was set to 100 in the BIOS, and upping it to 110, gave 10% more power...

I thought the link said that this FSB was set to 100 in the BIOS, and upping it to 110, gave 10% more power...

Some processors do use a 100MHz FSB...some use 66MHz, 133MHz, 166MHz, 200MHz, and various other tricks are used to get them up to 800MHz.

Pretty sure the 2000+ uses 133MHz, as does the 2200+. Though these will probably be "dual channel", giving effectively 266MHz as the FSB...simple, no?

Rob.

So, it might be safe to up toward 150? :confused:

So, it might be safe to up toward 150? :confused:

No hard and fast rules, but I'd be surprised if you could get it up to 150...personal experiences suggest that the limit is roughly around 10% of recommended, so you'd be looking at about 146. Even then, might be intermittent.

The way it used to work was that the processors were made in batches, of which a small sample were taken and tested to their reliable maximum speed. This then became the speed the entire batch was marked at. So if it happened that those benchmarked from the batch were particularly slow, then you could stand to have a processor which could handle much faster speeds.

I believe the process is a bit less random these days though...

Rob.

Hmmm, think I may go for less than 10% then, to go for reliability over speed.

Or i could just add a fresh 2.6/2.8 tower to the whole thing which would be better.

If your mobo aint got a PCI/AGP lock then dont forget that upping the FSB will not only overclock your CPU but the rest of your system too. Cheap memory is usually the stumbling block before any damage will happen to ur CPU. If you PC resets or you have stability issues, I'll wager that it'll be ur memory that will be the problem.

Up your FSB in small increments then run a benchmark (3dmark2001 would be best for ur PC) to test for stability. If it runs ok then up the fsb again and run benchmark. Keep doing this until you start to have stability issues then lower it back to a stable state. This will be your max FSB.

You can also lower memory timings and overclock you GPU once you have reached the limit with FSB.

Next stage is upping the voltage although if you are not experienced with overclocking I wouldn't go there.

This is my score with 3dmark 2001:

[/img]

Before I clocked my system I was getting around 18,500 so improvements can be made...just tread carefully!