We now officially have a new member on the team.

yup, and I'm STILL confused!!

Urrrm' date=' I have got a bend, but a folding sounds painful ! I have also got access at work to massively underused , networked pc's.

If i understood what you guys sound so serious about, I may be able to help, but I am sure there are others like me who are slightly wary, and not entirely sober, but mean well nonetheless, who are just rather confused,.

Please explain , in English ![/quote']

You're welcome to PM / MSN me when you've sobered up.

Essentially it utilises spare CPU power for the good of Stanford University's distributed computing project.

There's a folding forum on here, and its worth scanning the stickies on there - especially my guide to setting it up as a service without the use of any physically installed program.

i'm in. 4x machines on semipermanently...

i'll have to give it a go, never done folding before but I have a semi decent machine so should be ok.

It's fairly highly overclocked so will be interesting to see how it stands up to long time stress (it can run prime for over 12hours no problems).

Current machine is a Athlon 64 San Diego core (1Mb Cache) runnign at 2.7Ghz(standard 2.2Ghz) (Just quicker than a FX-57 according to benchmarks) with 2Gb of RAM. How long will a unit take to complete on this?

i'll have to give it a go' date=' never done folding before but I have a semi decent machine so should be ok.

It's fairly highly overclocked so will be interesting to see how it stands up to long time stress (it can run prime for over 12hours no problems).

Current machine is a Athlon 64 San Diego core (1Mb Cache) runnign at 2.7Ghz(standard 2.2Ghz) (Just quicker than a FX-57 according to benchmarks) with 2Gb of RAM. How long will a unit take to complete on this?[/quote']

San Diego? Which one's that - 3700+ ? I suspect it will be damn quick. The huge amount of ram won't help hugely, but the clocking might. Can you help me clock my Venice 3500+ setup some time please?

That machine will be up there with the best folding machines, but due to the variability of work unit size, there's not set completion time. Just know it will crunch very quick, and score pretty damn well. (oh, and service setup, as per my guide, works well )

Cool, cheers I will have a read of that when I get chance.

Yeah my San Diego is a 3700+ stock clocks of 2.2Ghz, was well impressed it gets to 2.7Ghz at stock voltage. If i'd spent more money on a better motherboard this would happily run 2.8-2.9Ghz, as it is it's quick enough for me. San Diego cores are the same cores used in the rediculously priced FX-57 chips (they have 1Mb L2 Cache instead of 512Kb), I like my bargins a £160 chip that now beats a £550 chip

Venice cores used to clock quite well, people were buying 3200s and running them near enough at stock voltage at 2.4-2.5Ghz.

I take it yours runs at 2.2Ghz? Should probably be able to get it to 2.4Ghz - 2.5Ghz with a bit of work.

A lot of it depends on what motherboard you have (options available in the bios) and what RAM you have (which will dictate whether you can run it syncronous or asynchronous, 200/166/133 settings).

I'll happily give ya some tips and see how far it will go if ya want, but it's often pot luck. What motherboard and RAM do you have?

EDIT: Just as a side note, should you ever have the need or the want to take the CPU cooler off take a quick look at the stepping code on the CPU. This has a huge effect on overclocking potential. When new faster chips are produced using the same core as the slower chips they don't re-do the whole production line for the slower chips they use the same core and just lock them to a lower speed. So the later steppings for the 3000/3200 are actually using much quicker cores and hence they can be hugely overclocked.

Having a quick search it appears the best venice cores are weeks 0515 and 0517 and code EPAW (or most ending in PAW).

If ya don't know where to look here's a picture http://img180.imageshack.us/my.php?image=venice5qu.jpg

The characters underneath the red box are the week number and stepping code.

.

I'll happily give ya some tips and see how far it will go if ya want' date=' but it's often pot luck. What motherboard and RAM do you have?

[/quote']

I've sent you a PM to keep chatter out of here, although the :bump: for the thread is good.

Its an Asus, from memory A8VN board, and DDR400 ram.

Have to admit I don't know anything about overclocking... but have been pondering whether anything can be done with my 'old' pc, which is now used purely for folding and downloading.....

what do I need to know, to find out if I can overclock it?

Caz - Just tell us what it is, and what kind of components it has. I once tried clocking my Athlon 750 when I was in a "bugger it" mood, and didn't care about breaking it... and I did. Had to do a full bios restore after I pushed some multiplier too far....

But with the AMD 64, I don't want to do this, so getting advice first.

Most motherboards come with a fail safe option, or at the very least a clear CMOS jumper on the board. This allows ya to reset everything in case it goes wrong and the PC doesn't boot (which happens a lot when ya first finding the limit lol).

Normally if the PC doesn't boot you can turn off the machine, hold down 'insert' and turn it back on, if it has fail safe support it should boot with default settings allowing you to get into bios to restore the settings that caused it to screw up.

If you don't adjust the voltage it's actually reasonably difficult to kill a PC by overclocking (although not impossible) it either boots or doesn't, if it doesn't it needs resetting and trying again.

Like remapping your car, PC components are built with a certain degree of tolerance to their normal operating speeds. The degree of tolerance is usually down to the quality of the component. Buying well know and pricier brands generally overclock better. The high performance stuff is pretty much built with overclockers in mind as they are the biggest customer of the high end equipment. Hell even ATi and NVidia now include an overclocking tool for their graphics cards built into the official drivers.

:bump:

We have a vast number of idle team members at the moment - come on people, get folding again!

was just thinking the same the other day (maybe they are members no longer around here?)

Could be, but we need all the help we can. The 24hr average for the team has exceeded 13,000 which is great news. My AMD64 is helping me get nicely over 200 points a day, which I'm well chuffed with.

Just looking for that opportunity / opportunities to further spread the word.

Get the service on all the work PC's before/if you leave Jason

i've been having a few issues with recent installs(service) on some of the slightly older P4's, even though i've set everything right, through the Fah console, they dont then start automatically on startup - yep ive made sure it was set to automatically start.

Otherwise i'd have been upto over 20 machines now

Admin rights Phil. :( Stop me doing it.

(Can you tell I've tried already without asking? )

Besides, my PC here is a load of total gobsh**e. :grumpy: Must be 6 or 7 years old.

Oh, and to get it working as a service, I've always cancelled the DOS window after initial setup (after it just kicks off folding from DOS screen), gone into services and started the service from there (right click, start). Then in theory it should restart after a reboot. Well, it does on mine. PCs with logins etc might be a little different.

That is correct, Jason. It is the way I use dto do it when I had my folding farm at the last employer.

Yeah thing is, as this is a one time setup(ie not my machines), i dont want to have to keep checking back to see if they have started - most i've setup as a service are running by them selves just fine, just the odd one or two that seem to have problems. Oh and i sometimes get the attempting to send wu's problem like you described yourself (one of them tried 45 times) but after a reboot everything was fine again.

Odd

I still cant run it as a service I have the exe running manually then use another program to minimise the cmd window to the system tray. Not ideal as it means I cant install it on any other machines here.

FAH-502-console -configonly and when prompted (install as service) type Yes.

i know full well how to install the service - However, when running as a service it cannot connect to the results server.

Very strange, try the config option again. When prompted for the proxy settings the default is to use internet explorer settings. Try changing that to No and entering the IP and port number manually, as the service runs before a user logs in then you need to do this otherwise it wont know how to find a proxy.

Been there tried that, written a thread about it

i know full well how to install the service - However, when running as a service it cannot connect to the results server.

Sounds similar to my issues I had with my two machines.... Wonder if all along it was the folding server at fault, rather than my machines.

My two are both set to use I.E settings as well which further confused me as when both machines weren't connecting to FAH I could happily browse the web. :confused: