I may soon be inheriting a 2005 HP Pavilion Desktop system. It currently has 2GB RAM, a new NVIDIA graphics card with 512 MB RAM, a new generic 5.1 sound card with game port, and a 200 GB SATA HD.

The HD is failing right now. It is frequently; but, intermittently freezing the OS. (Win XP 32 bit) Because it is displaying "AMD 64", I would like to install one of my spare 250 GB SATA drives into it, and install Win XP Pro X64 and see if that takes. If it does, then it will truly be a 64 Bit machine. Just because it says AMD 64, I don't know if the entire hardware architecture from HP in 2005 was 64 bit. If anyone here knows better than I, please chime in. If it truly is a 64 bit machine, I would like to expand the RAM to 4 GB from 2, and put Win 7 Pro on it. However; will an old AMD 64 from 2005 crunch SETI on BOINC 7.2.33 or higher???

I don't have this machine, yet. A friend of mine is going to use it "until th HD completely dies"; which could be a period of months, or weeks. She will be replacing that system with a new laptop. She is aware that the new laptop will have Win 8.1 on it; but, she doesn't care. She just wants a new system. Since I have been maintaining the HP for her, (over the past month), she is willing to give it to me.

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TimeLord04
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Mine did so can't see why that won't. Also, had a customer's rig a Pentium D from 2005 crunch for years until I upgraded it to an Athlon X3 last year. It might not be fast as you wish, but it will crunch away.

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Mine did so can't see why that won't. Also, had a customer's rig a Pentium D from 2005 crunch for years until I upgraded it to an Athlon X3 last year. It might not be fast as you wish, but it will crunch away.

If I had to guess, (from memory), I believe the Processor is being clocked at 2.4 GHz. That's faster than the Athlon XP that I'm currently using with Linux. Plus, being an AMD 64 chip, it intrigues me. I'm hoping that the entire hardware architecture is 64 bit; but, I just don't know.

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TimeLord04
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As far as I know there was never a CPU called "AMD 64" Perhaps it is an "Athlon 64"? Either way it will run SETI@home. It just depends on how fast or efficiently.

Perhaps a list of AMD CPU's will help you identify which CPU it might be and to find out what it can do. Also CPUz is a common app that many use to ID a CPU and it's feature set.

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As far as I know there was never a CPU called "AMD 64" Perhaps it is an "Athlon 64"? Either way it will run SETI@home. It just depends on how fast or efficiently.

Perhaps a list of AMD CPU's will help you identify which CPU it might be and to find out what it can do. Also CPUz is a common app that many use to ID a CPU and it's feature set.

Without the system in front of me to install CPUz; my current best guess, from the list you have provided, is that it is either a late Sempron or early Athlon 64. I hope it is an Athlon 64. I will run CPUz when I get the machine.

Thanks for the list.

[EDIT]

Also, when I performed a right click on My Computer and selected Properties, that's where I saw "AMD 64 Processor", NOT specifying which one, but showing approximately 2.4 GHz speed.

[Another EDIT]

Also, when I opened the case, the Motherboard has 4 DDR RAM slots; so, VERY expandable for a brand named computer.

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TimeLord04
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She is aware that the new laptop will have Win 8.1 on it; but, she doesn't care. She just wants a new system. Since I have been maintaining the HP for her, (over the past month), she is willing to give it to me.

Is she aware that if she buys a laptop from HP that they sell models with Win7 on them?

Cheers.

She is aware that the new laptop will have Win 8.1 on it; but, she doesn't care. She just wants a new system. Since I have been maintaining the HP for her, (over the past month), she is willing to give it to me.

Is she aware that if she buys a laptop from HP that they sell models with Win7 on them?

Cheers.

Apparently, NOT from COSTCO... ALL HP's sold by COSTCO are on Win 8.1. COSTCO has a 90 Day return policy; and, because of that, she wants to get it from COSTCO.

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TimeLord04
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As far as I know there was never a CPU called "AMD 64" Perhaps it is an "Athlon 64"? Either way it will run SETI@home. It just depends on how fast or efficiently.

Perhaps a list of AMD CPU's will help you identify which CPU it might be and to find out what it can do. Also CPUz is a common app that many use to ID a CPU and it's feature set.

Correct, it is Athlon 64. I ran quite a few of those and the only one to run at 2.4ghz was the 4600+. the 5000+ ran at 3.0 & the 6000+ ran at 3.2.

I still run a socket 939 Athlon64 X2 3800+ running at 1.67ghz. It crunched reasonably well.

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Sure it will work. Not blazingly fast, as it's almost 10 years old, but it will work. If the Nvidia card has 512 mB ram then it's probably CUDA capable so that's a bonus.

But I wouldn't actually spend money upgrading it. If you have spare RAM and a second hand hard disk, then plug them in and have a play. Otherwise just plug in whatever disk you have find and load a system on it. If you only want to run BOINC then you could stick with 2gb ram, XP and an old (free) 40gb disk. Unless you surf the net or open emails the lack of XP support wont really matter, it will still run. More ram and a new OS won't help performance in any noticeable way, unless you actually want to use the machine for "other stuff".

Have fun

Ian

Yes, older "AMD 64" will crunch just fine. You can just go stock and it should just work, but if you go optimized, you'll have to find out what instruction sets the processor is capable of.

Here's my single-core Sempron 3200+ machine. It is socket 939. I migrated the hostID over from a socket 754 Sempron 3400+ since the board in that one got to the point where replacing capacitors still wasn't able to prolong its life. That machine is running optimized, and it goes full-blast on MB and AP. 49 hours per AP, and about 7.5 hours per "normal" MB (2.5-3 hours for a shorty and 11 hours for a.. VHAR?). As you can see by its RAC, it isn't a beast by any means whatsoever. It hasn't even broken 1M credits and it has been crunching 24/7 for just over 6 years now.

So.. if the video card is decent in the one you've acquired, I would go GPU-only on it to let the CPU feed the GPU. That's going to be your best bet on that one.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Sure it will work. Not blazingly fast, as it's almost 10 years old, but it will work. If the Nvidia card has 512 mB ram then it's probably CUDA capable so that's a bonus.

But I wouldn't actually spend money upgrading it. If you have spare RAM and a second hand hard disk, then plug them in and have a play. Otherwise just plug in whatever disk you have find and load a system on it. If you only want to run BOINC then you could stick with 2gb ram, XP and an old (free) 40gb disk. Unless you surf the net or open emails the lack of XP support wont really matter, it will still run. More ram and a new OS won't help performance in any noticeable way, unless you actually want to use the machine for "other stuff".

Have fun

Ian

The 2GB RAM are new, the NVIDIA card is new, and the generic 5.1 Sound Card is new. Total cost: $120 The hard drive is original, and now is failing. I have a replacement 250 GB SATA drive new in package from 2006.

If I install my copy of XP Pro X64 on it, that's free; and I'd leave the system at 2 GB RAM. If; however, I purchase Win 7 Pro from Amazon.com, that's approx. $150, and I would need another 2 GB RAM at under $50. I'm willing to spend that $200; if the whole system is truly 64 bit, since XP support will now end in 2015.

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TimeLord04
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Sure it will work. Not blazingly fast, as it's almost 10 years old, but it will work. If the Nvidia card has 512 mB ram then it's probably CUDA capable so that's a bonus.

But I wouldn't actually spend money upgrading it. If you have spare RAM and a second hand hard disk, then plug them in and have a play. Otherwise just plug in whatever disk you have find and load a system on it. If you only want to run BOINC then you could stick with 2gb ram, XP and an old (free) 40gb disk. Unless you surf the net or open emails the lack of XP support wont really matter, it will still run. More ram and a new OS won't help performance in any noticeable way, unless you actually want to use the machine for "other stuff".

Have fun

Ian

The 2GB RAM are new, the NVIDIA card is new, and the generic 5.1 Sound Card is new. Total cost: $120 The hard drive is original, and now is failing. I have a replacement 250 GB SATA drive new in package from 2006.

If I install my copy of XP Pro X64 on it, that's free; and I'd leave the system at 2 GB RAM. If; however, I purchase Win 7 Pro from Amazon.com, that's approx. $150, and I would need another 2 GB RAM at under $50. I'm willing to spend that $200; if the whole system is truly 64 bit, since XP support will now end in 2015.

Depending on what you are doing 2GB is fine for Windows 7. If the plan is to make it a dedicated cruncher you could install Windows 7 without entering the key and "evaluate" Windows 7 for however long you like. So long as you are not concerned about getting Windows Updates. Unlike Vista you can dismiss the "activate now" message after logging in and still use the system. I was looking for Win 7 for a guy at work & found OEM versions of Pro for around $80 on ebay.

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Is this machine only going to be used for SETI, or do you have another use for it as well?

If it's just to run SETI, then that $200 is just money down the drain, it will give you no more crunching performance.

If you spend the $200 on a mid range graphics card, you will get maybe a 10X boost?

Of course if you actually want to USE the machine, then installing a new version of Windows makes more sense, but even then, I'd probably just put Linux on it as use it till it died.

Ian

Is this machine only going to be used for SETI, or do you have another use for it as well?

If it's just to run SETI, then that $200 is just money down the drain, it will give you no more crunching performance.

If you spend the $200 on a mid range graphics card, you will get maybe a 10X boost?

I second that.

My home computer is a 64bit socket 939 Athlon X2 3800+. There is no way in hell I'm using it for SETI. I wanted it to contribute so I bought a second hand GTX 650TI boost for 130$(stuff are more expensive here in Europe), set it to GPU only, and it does about 8700RAC.

If you are going to use this for SETI only I would suggest you verify that you have a PCI Express slot on your motherboard and buy a second hand GTX 650TI Boost for no more than 80/90 bucks off e-bay. Make sure it's cheap - there are some insane offers out there.

Just because it says AMD 64, I don't know if the entire hardware architecture from HP in 2005 was 64 bit.

There is no such thing as "entire hardware architecture" being 64 bit. If your CPU is 64bit then you can install 64bit OS and can address large amounts of RAM. That is it.

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Sirius B wrote:

Correct, it is Athlon 64. I ran quite a few of those and the only one to run at 2.4ghz was the 4600+. the 5000+ ran at 3.0 & the 6000+ ran at 3.2.

Well, that probably depends on which generation we are talking about. My "Brisbane" is an 5600+ and runs at 2.9GHz. The performance of this machine you can see here. With 2.4GHz it will be of course slower unless it has a more modern core or has simply more cores.

As other have said, it should work without any issues with SETI, but it won't be fast compared to any modern hardware and will use lots of energy for the amount of work done. I wouldn't recommend to invest any money in that anymore, at least not $200. For little more than that you can get a new i3 + mainboard and RAM, which will do a lot more crunching using less energy and if you plan to use it for something else, the additional computing power is also nice to have, those old Athlons are really quite slow, I know it, I have one ;-).

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It will certainly crunch and it shouldn't have any problems with a new BOINC.

Do you know what NV card? Any GPU than can crunch is bound to outperform the CPU so it may not be worth the money and effort to get more out of the CPU.

I don't think there are stock 64 bit CPU apps but the Lunatics 64bit installer has 64bit MB apps.
Anybody know what SSE level that Athlon might have?

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

Athlon 64 supports SSE3.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Athlon 64 supports SSE3.

Starting from Venice chip.
First Athlon 64 Winchester ones support SSE2 only.

EDIT: Also I had positive experience (it worked) with using Winchester + GT9400 NV GPU. GPU was attached via PCI<-> PCIe conversion slot.

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Is this machine only going to be used for SETI, or do you have another use for it as well?

If it's just to run SETI, then that $200 is just money down the drain, it will give you no more crunching performance.

If you spend the $200 on a mid range graphics card, you will get maybe a 10X boost?

I second that.

My home computer is a 64bit socket 939 Athlon X2 3800+. There is no way in hell I'm using it for SETI. I wanted it to contribute so I bought a second hand GTX 650TI boost for 130$(stuff are more expensive here in Europe), set it to GPU only, and it does about 8700RAC.

If you are going to use this for SETI only I would suggest you verify that you have a PCI Express slot on your motherboard and buy a second hand GTX 650TI Boost for no more than 80/90 bucks off e-bay. Make sure it's cheap - there are some insane offers out there.

Just because it says AMD 64, I don't know if the entire hardware architecture from HP in 2005 was 64 bit.

There is no such thing as "entire hardware architecture" being 64 bit. If your CPU is 64bit then you can install 64bit OS and can address large amounts of RAM. That is it.

I think "entire hardware architecture" would be referring to CPU, motherboard, & BIOS. Which all are required to run a 64-bit OS.

Also it is worth noting that there is no real advantage to going from 32-bit to 64-bit for SETI@home. As all of the apps are 32-bit

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I think "entire hardware architecture" would be referring to CPU, motherboard, & BIOS. Which all are required to run a 64-bit OS.

I was trying to assertively address the implication that there might be a 64 bit CPU running on a partially(the opposite of "entire") 64bit "hardware architecture". To reiterate. If the CPU is 64 bit on a running computer there is no room for worry if it is an "entire hardware architecture". In any case, you are right, there are a whole bunch of stuff that are required to run a CPU capable of executing 64 bit instruction set and you can slice it in all kinds of ways. From "CPU, motherboard, & BIOS" to "CPU, north bridge, south bridge, BIOS" to... you get the idea.

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