I have one at home. It's a P!!! 1GHz (O/C to 1.15GHz) with 256MB PC150 SDRAM & 20GB hard disk.

I know it is quite 'ancient' by today's standards. But when I built it back in 2001, it was a speed demon.

I intend to use this old rig to crunch until it fails.
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Also, not long ago, I tried using a PII-350MHz with only 64MB SDRAM (my auntie gave it to me) to crunch, but gave up because it was simply too slow and lacked the RAM to crunch workunits.

Yes. You could even say that I am one of the 'Masters of the Slugs'.

Also, now that the Initial Replication is the same as the Minimum Quorum, your slugs won't be wasting any of their time running SAH anymore.

BTW, PII's do all right for themselves given their age. Far better than my K6's due to their superior FPU's, and you can always pick up some more RAM for it cheap on eBay if you wanted to. Your PIII, while not state of the art, is still capable of a pretty healthy RAC. I have a 550 Katmai and have no intention of retiring it any time soon.

Alinator

I have one at home. It's a P!!! 1GHz (O/C to 1.15GHz) with 256MB PC150 SDRAM & 20GB hard disk.

I know it is quite 'ancient' by today's standards. But when I built it back in 2001, it was a speed demon.

I intend to use this old rig to crunch until it fails.
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Also, not long ago, I tried using a PII-350MHz with only 64MB SDRAM (my auntie gave it to me) to crunch, but gave up because it was simply too slow and lacked the RAM to crunch workunits.

I used to run a 500mhz P3 until I advanced to a 1ghz AMD Duron, and now my main crunching rig is a 1.3ghz Celeron. I still run the 500mhz P3 but am using it as a router and web server so I'm concerned about the extra load on it with all it's other duties. I know BOINC would back off for any other use, but that wouldn't allow much left for BOINC. I ran it for a while before I rearranged my network stuff off of my 1.3ghz to it so I wouldn't have to take down my web server every time I needed to use Windows on my main box. Of course it has 256mb of ram so it didn't have any memory limits. It actually crunched about 75% as fast as my 1.0ghz since it crunched full time and I used my other comps for other things too.

There's quite a few other threads that detail the use of older comps for crunching.

Now that they have reduced the replication of results to two, it would be profitable to dust off a few of these older computers as now they would be assured of doing scientifically useful work without coming in third as "redundant". Now once it's started crunching a result it would be allowed to continue and be part of the quorum. My 500mhz comp has had a fair number of results entered as cannonical and actually stored in the database.

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Jim

Some people plan their life out and look back at the wealth they've had.
Others live life day by day and look back at the wealth of experiences and enjoyment they've had.

I have got a P111, 856 Mhz with 512 ram PC120 SDRam and 40 gb hard drive, if I get it back I will be doing Seti. Would not log onto net through windows so brother is finding out why. He has had it since Easter and if still cannot get through will convert it to Linux

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I stopped using my Pentium III 450 in May 2006. It still resides in the bedroom under the vanity with a few old files on it that I may want to transfer to the newer PD950s I'm using. Whenever I get around to it I'll finish that transfer. I really had had a lot of trouble with its old mouse until I got inside it and cleaned all that crap off its shafts. In the living room still rests the 386 that I used between 1990 and 1999. When I get done I'll probably take those machines to a friend of my mother's to have them recycled (probably for materials). The 17" CRT monitor will remain here in case of emergency. The 13" will go.

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right now I have 3 PIII PCs crunching. 1 450Mhz, 1 500 Mhz and 1 750Mhz Laptop even have a dual PII 400Mhz that's been crunching since classic days. Looks like I'm going to inherit a couple more PCs in the next couple weeks one of which I know is a PIII. Both will get added to my crunching stack.

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SETI Classic Stats:
Workunits processed 28,419
Total CPU time 216,314 hours

My PC is with 2xPIII 1GHz, somewhere around 2002, this was a server, but now sitting on my desk, crunching SETI, when I'm on work. Im very pleased, it does perfect job (Internet, movies, music, home work).

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BTW, PII's do all right for themselves given their age. Far better than my K6's due to their superior FPU's, and you can always pick up some more RAM for it cheap on eBay if you wanted to. Your PIII, while not state of the art, is still capable of a pretty healthy RAC. I have a 550 Katmai and have no intention of retiring it any time soon.

Alinator

I agree that the PII has better FPU performance than the K6. But it is still slow in my opinion. I don't think memory upgrades are worthwhile for older systems using SDR SDRAM because of the high price (per megabyte).

I win

I have a Pentium 60Mhz, 48 Meg ram, desktop, still crunching. Without opt app it took 36 days to do ONE wu. After Opt app it took just over 2 weeks for ONE wu. It's now crunching at Leiden Classical hostid=25542 and currently has a RAC of 0.37.

PIII 800MHz with 640MB of memory running Chicken 2.2b.

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"Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor

I have a P III-750 laptop still crunchin' away... good for about 50 credits/day. It takes about 28 Hours to crunch a standard WU.

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Dual PIII 800Mhz. Coppermines on a Tyan Tiger 133 mobo. Doesn't do half bad for its age.

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I've got a P-II 300 crunching. It get a RAC of around 30.

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

I have 2 P3 rigs -

1. A single CPU P£ bought originally as a 450MHz Katami on Win98SE. Later upgraded to a 750MHz Coppermine under Win2K, and very mildly OC to 775.

2. A dual P3 Coppermine @ 933Mhz on a Supermicro Server Board, under Win2K Pro. This rig runs a RAID+1 mirroe, and is my data and email server. It also crunches for SETIand Einstein, averaging about 300+ RAC combined.

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

I've got a P-II 300 crunching. It get a RAC of around 30.

You've received 10,000 for that baby, it's still crunchin' and usefull.

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My slugs have accounted for over 20% of my total BOINC credit, and I don't regret one second of the time I've run them either. ;-)

Alinator

I've got a P-II 300 crunching. It get a RAC of around 30.

You've received 10,000 for that baby, it's still crunchin' and usefull.

I hadn't noticed that it had gotten that high, and in just over 13 months. ;)

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

And I've got over 12,000 on this Celeron 400 Mendocino. Interestingly, it's got 13,893 credits on Einstein, on a 50-50 split, even though I use Chicken optimised here and stock at Einstein.

Not showing any SETI WUs at the moment, because I took it over to Beta to help check out some last-minute problems - but it'll be back once MB is mainstream.

400 MHz PII Deschutes, SuSE Linux 10.1, BOINC 5.8.17, SETI MMX optimized, Einstein 4.35, QMC standard. Share: Einstein 300, SETI and QMC 100. Meets all deadlines, no validation error. BOINC alternates Einstein and SETI like a clock, QMC appears less often. Power consumption low, no additional coolers. 320 MB RAM, 2 HD (one for Linux, one for WIN98SE on a dual boot system), one DVD RW. L2 cache is 512k.
Tullio

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My slowest machine is a Coppermine Pentium III, 930 MHz or thereabouts. It has an Einstein RAC of about 100 and a SETI RAC of about 4.

Keeping it running for BOINC is nuts on a credits/power consumption basis. It is one of the household's primary PC's. Had I not just rebuilt both of the other two, I'd strongly consider replacing it. Maybe next year with a Penryn or some such.

I think keeping old machines running for BOINC on the theory they are cost-effective because paid for ignores the cost of electric power rather badly. So I'm afraid I disagree with the major theme of this thread.

My Q6600 PC will probably stabilize at a RAC about 25 times higher than my Pentium III PC. The system power consumption is far less than 25x.

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