Somebody gave me the old Dell computer on which I have been running S@H for several months now, since I re-joined after a two-year hiatus. This computer is a Dell Dimension 8100 with an INTEL 4 cpu running Windows XP at 1.4 MHz. It is incerdibly slow, but very steady. After maybe 2 1/2 months [5 1/2 months] or so crunching SETI 24/7, my total credit is a humongous 6156. Some of you guys do that or twice that in one day! It takes this machine a week or more to do an Astropulse W.U.

My previous history with S@H goes back almost to its beginning, when I ran a HP on an email address I no longer use. I lost maybe 30,000 old credits when I changed email addresses. When I switched to yet another email on a faster Polywell Athlon-based computer, I lost another 30,000 or so. Both my old computers were faster than this one. Every time I changed emails, I lost all my previous credits because I couldn't remember my passwords, etc. When I siigned on in May [I now see that I joined in january. My how time flies.], I used my new Eckerd College email. Needless to say, I am not very computer-savvy. I just use 'em for work and stuff. Plus, I have my wife's old Polywell which needs a hard drive and whose USB ports don't work, but with an Athlon running at 2.4 MHz, is pretty fast.

SOOooo, my question is, is it even worthwhile using these old boxes to run SETI@Home? Would it be feasible to upgrade these old machines and dedicate the three of them to SETI (or some other BOINC projects)? It would get really hot in this small room with three old computers crunching SETI 24/7. And my wife would complain about the electricity bill.

Or should I consign them to the electronics recycler and build a newer and much more powerful machine like most of you guys have?

I also have some other questions about S@H which I will ask on another post.
Steve G.
Oldsmar, FL

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I just googled "donate old computers in florida" and it came up with a few places that will recycle computers to good causes.

But probably your best bet is just contact your Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for advise.

http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/categories/electronics/pages/reuseanddonations.htm

I just googled "donate old computers in florida" and it came up with a few places that will recycle computers to good causes.

But probably your best bet is just contact your Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for advise.

http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/categories/electronics/pages/reuseanddonations.htm

Thanks for your reply. I know I could donate these computers to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Maybe a church somewhere. Schools don't want them because kids only want newer fast computers.

So if even the charities don't want them, Pinellas County has sites that accept electronics for recycling to keep them out of the landfill. (I teach Environmental Science, so I wanna do it right.) I'd rather not just throw them away.

On the other hand, I could just lest this old Dell keep on crunching on... slowly, but steadily.

What say you?
Steve G.
Oldsmar, FL

SOOooo, my question is, is it even worthwhile using these old boxes to run SETI@Home? Would it be feasible to upgrade these old machines and dedicate the three of them to SETI (or some other BOINC projects)? It would get really hot in this small room with three old computers crunching SETI 24/7. And my wife would complain about the electricity bill.

Or should I consign them to the electronics recycler and build a newer and much more powerful machine like most of you guys have?

I also have some other questions about S@H which I will ask on another post.
Steve G.
Oldsmar, FL

I inherited a Dell Dimension P4/XP box last summer from the office of a Veterans' Service Organization I belong to. It had been acting flakey, so we replaced it with a slightly newer one donated by the County. I took it home, cleaned it, had a tech give it a once-over, and it ran Seti@Home and some other non-vital tasks for almost a year, until a virus damaged the hard drive and I retired it. I also run two ancient Mac G4s, and two used P4HT/Xp boxes bought at the County Surplus store.

If you want to pay for the power it consumes to run S@H, if you think the results you produce are of value to the project, and you are not deterred by the fact that it crunches so slowly and acrues little credit compared to newer boxes, then let it run. Every valid result is useful to the project.

If you don't think it is worth it, donate it to charity or the recycle facility.

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Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

At 1 AP WU per week, a conservative 100 watt draw on your Dell, 10 cents per KW hr it would cost you ~ $1.75 per WU.

My q6600 with nVidia Gtx 560ti GPU does 3 AP WU in ~2 hrs, draw is ~200 watts with no cpu seti work being done. ~ 2 cents per WU.

Newer CPUs may fare better but work done on GPUs is at least 5 times more efficient.

Taking AC costs into consideration would skew the calculation further to the negative.

I inherited a Dell Dimension P4/XP box last summer from the office of a Veterans' Service Organization I belong to. It had been acting flakey, so we replaced it with a slightly newer one donated by the County. I took it home, cleaned it, had a tech give it a once-over, and it ran Seti@Home and some other non-vital tasks for almost a year, until a virus damaged the hard drive and I retired it. I also run two ancient Mac G4s, and two used P4HT/Xp boxes bought at the County Surplus store.

If you want to pay for the power it consumes to run S@H, if you think the results you produce are of value to the project, and you are not deterred by the fact that it crunches so slowly and acrues little credit compared to newer boxes, then let it run. Every valid result is useful to the project.

If you don't think it is worth it, donate it to charity or the recycle facility.[/quote]

I do think the effort is worth doing. That's why I re-enlisted in S@H. But it is frustratiing to see people doing several WUs per day and tens of millions of credits while this one takes a week and has amassed less than 6100 credits in more than 5 months.

You said "every valid result is useful to the project." But one would think a computer's time amd efforts might be ten or twenty times more valuable to the project if it did that much more work in the same amount of time. Sometimes I think the real SETI superstars are laughing and snickering at the puny efforts of my old computer.

On the other hand, this clunky old Dell just might be the one that finds the next WOW signal. Would they let me know if it did?

Steve Gaber
Oldsmar, FL

At 1 AP WU per week, a conservative 100 watt draw on your Dell, 10 cents per KW hr it would cost you ~ $1.75 per WU.

My q6600 with nVidia Gtx 560ti GPU does 3 AP WU in ~2 hrs, draw is ~200 watts with no cpu seti work being done. ~ 2 cents per WU.

Newer CPUs may fare better but work done on GPUs is at least 5 times more efficient.

Taking AC costs into consideration would skew the calculation further to the negative.

WOW! Three Astropulse WUs in two hours?? It might take this computer a month to do that. It makes my efforts seem woefully inadequate.

I don't regard SET@Home as a competition, I don't do it for the credit, and i don't care too much about the $1.75 per WU. But damn, compared to yours, the speed of this computer is ridiculous. It makes me wonder if I should put the machine out to pasture like a tired old horse.

That's why I asked it it woud be feasible to upgrade any of my three old computers to be appreciably faster than this one currently is?

Replace the mother board, get a new CPU, more RAM and a bigger hard drive? Or just start over from scratch with components from Tiger Direct or some other supplier?

Steve Gaber
Oldsmar, FL

If you want to "squize" more from this old computer you could either use 3 possible solutions if you have electronic knowledgue of course by adding a GPU card (only small and slow GPU´s in your case).

The first one, you could try to find a very rare AGP Nvidia (you video computer interface uses the old AGP standards)that runs with SETI, there are very few models that do that, and i realy dont rememeber if any one of them runs on the new BOINC, you could search in the forums there is a thread about that with all pros and cons.

The second is to try to find a PCI GPU (not PCI-e) that works with SETI, they exist but are very rare and as i remember they have a high cost exactly because they are hard to find. Against in the forum you have the clues how to do that.

Or you could try to use a PCI-PCIe expansion board that allow you to use normal PCI-e GPU, but be aware even in this case your PIV could only support very slow GPU´s (something like the old 8600, 9500, etc) and don´t forget the RAM limitation of your old host. There are several examples in the forum. But that is the most dificult to realy put to work of the 3 options because requires more skills and technical knowledgue like you need to know how to mechanical fix the board, etc..

Any one of the 3 options are not simple but works and keep your old host more productive (don´t expect nothing exceptional of course maybe 2-5x times the actual production) if you want to keep it running.

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You do have to question the efficiency of running those older PCs. I only run mine in the cold weather. 100w of heat is 100w of heat no matter whether you pump it though a space heater or an old PC.

If the old box is a standard motherboard layout then an option is to gut it and put some new parts in. An Athalon II cpu, system board, a stick of Ram and a cheapo CUDA graphics card (one that will run of that power supply)

Load it all up with a fresh install of XP, (or Linux).

Now you have a PC that will crunch a useful amount, and will be a useful daily driver, and even some mid range gaming. Not state of the art, slow old hard dish etc, but probably only cost $300 if you buy all the parts new, less if you get some used bits.

Ian <- dumpster diver from way back :-)

My 2008 SUN WS with an Opteron 1210 is crunching 4 BOINC projects, including Test4theory@home from CERN and Albert@home from the Hannover Institute for Gravitational Physics. It has also a Solaris Virtual Machine crunching SETI@home 6.03 by Dotsch but since SETI@home went to Version 7 I am unable to get any unit on it so I suspended it.
Tullio

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Moore's law in action, I'm afraid.

Just did a quick poke around newegg for US prices; looks like modernising the system will set you back about $150 or so at the low end, assuming you can carry over the drives and PSU (you'll need a new motherboard, CPU, and memory at the very least).

That'll give you an dual core A4 or A6-based machine at ~3.4ghz. back of the envelope calc gives that a runtime of about 10 hours for an AP unit, and the build wouldn't need a GPU (the A-series have it built into the CPU).

For an uplift to a full quad core you'll need to budget ~$250 a piece (including the now required GPU), ~$280 for a hexacore, and ~$320 for an 8 core machine.

If you need to replace the power supplies and hard drives, you'll need to add another $100 on to these estimates at minimum.


Even if you decide not to keep crunching one the old boys, keep the best of them - it's always useful to have a spare machine as a fallback in case your normal PC dies.

Came across this announcement for the new AMD CPU, in case you are interested.
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Came across this announcement for the new AMD CPU, in case you are interested

Have you seen the power draw on it? It's basically an 8-core Vishera with the TDP rated higher - 220w rated.

Not really sure what the target market is - it's not viable as an upgrade path (the TDP is too high for existing motherboards to support), so I guess they'll end up in the hands of the Alienware-like system builders?

In any case, figure the need for a specialised mobo and likely limited supply of the chips means that its likely be cheaper and more productive to crunch with a pair of FX-8320's.

Just kiddind of course but if you have a water cooling you could use it to produce hot water for your home usage.

As allways the heat is the problem, with CPU, GPU´s, etc.

Just imagine a host with this "monster" and 4x690... we are talking in a no less than 2KW power hungry machine, something close to an electric shower...it´s a lot of heat to disipate...

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Just kiddind of course but if you have a water cooling you could use it to produce hot water for your home usage.

As allways the heat is the problem, with CPU, GPU´s, etc.

Just imagine a host with this "monster" and 4x690... we are talking in a no less than 2KW power hungry machine, something close to an electric shower...it´s a lot of heat to disipate...

That reminds me, I need a new coffee-maker...

Just kiddind of course but if you have a water cooling you could use it to produce hot water for your home usage.

As allways the heat is the problem, with CPU, GPU´s, etc.

Just imagine a host with this "monster" and 4x690... we are talking in a no less than 2KW power hungry machine, something close to an electric shower...it´s a lot of heat to disipate...

That reminds me, I need a new coffee-maker...

You need a new kettle!

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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. (Mark Twain)

Just kiddind of course but if you have a water cooling you could use it to produce hot water for your home usage.

As allways the heat is the problem, with CPU, GPU´s, etc.

Just imagine a host with this "monster" and 4x690... we are talking in a no less than 2KW power hungry machine, something close to an electric shower...it´s a lot of heat to disipate...

That reminds me, I need a new coffee-maker...

You need a new kettle!

Well, having a new barista to drive the kettle would be nice too...

I lost maybe 30,000 old credits when I changed email addresses.

You can kinda/sorta get your old account back (I think) as long as you remember the actual email address you gave Seti the first time around. It doesn't matter if you still have actual access to that address or not. Not a lot will change though... you'll get to see your original sign-up date instead of 19 Jan 13 and somewhere buried in Seti's pages you'll get a shout-out that you've done x-many classic workunits. If you don't know or can't figure out how to do this, ask here.

As per your conundrum, I'm with our Dutch friend Administrator. Though he's not saying do/don't, he is trying to show you what your electricity is getting you as far as Seti is concerned.

Everyone here crunches differently but I assure you no-one (especially the Seti superstars) is poking fun at your machines. The vast majority here has too much respect for the project as well as any/all circuitry (no matter how old).

Just some random thoughts/suggestions:
-If you are not gonna replace them, keep using them
-If you can afford to replace them with something newer, it probably makes sense to do so after factoring in electricity costs
-Do you have a newish laptop? You could maybe crunch on that...
-Is their a Watt-limit you are not willing to go over? Say 100W? 200W

You could set profile for that computer where it would not receive any AP units.

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Somebody gave me the old Dell computer on which I have been running S@H for several months now, since I re-joined after a two-year hiatus. This computer is a Dell Dimension 8100 with an INTEL 4 cpu running Windows XP at 1.4 MHz. It is incerdibly slow, but very steady. After maybe 2 1/2 months [5 1/2 months] or so crunching SETI 24/7, my total credit is a humongous 6156. Some of you guys do that or twice that in one day! It takes this machine a week or more to do an Astropulse W.U.

If you install optimized applications, the crunch times will be just half or so. I'm running myself a 10 year old AthlonXP 2000+ (1666MHz), it needs about 80 hours for AP WU, your P4 should not need much more than that if you switch to optimized apps.

EDIT: Since your P4 has 1.4GHz it can only be a "Willamette", so you can use the SSE2 apps for both MB and AP.

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