Vintage & unusual Computers on Einstein@Home

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5842
Credit: 109387003472
RAC: 35926537

Whilst the Tualatin 1400 is

Whilst the Tualatin 1400 is an excellent legacy cruncher, I've discovered an even better performing legacy cpu which beats the T1400 on all fronts - price, performance and electricity consumption. It's the C1300 which is also part of the Tualatin family but only 256K L2 cache (same as coppermine PIIIs).

I've bought quite s few standard Celeron 1300 desktops which use the Gigabyte GA-6IEML tualatin mainboard. This board has a very nice BIOS feature - FSB settings from 66 to 200 MHz in steps of 1MHz. I've tested close to 20 celeron 1300 cpus in this board and found quite a variation in what FSB the chip will run at. The variation is from around 112MHz up to 130MHz. This is with just stock air cooling and no Vcore tweaking. Interestingly, more than 60% of those tested will run at 120 or better. 120 x 13 is 1560MHz and at that speed it is giving more credits/hr than a PIII 1400 in a DL380 server. Power consumption would be considerably less and there is virtually no noise from fans.

Best of all, the price per machine was around 13EUR ($AUD20) for a working system with 256MB RAM and a 20G HDD. I've set up a number dual booting both Windows and Linux and I'm very pleased to see them seemingly quite stable at 120MHz FSB. The only downside is that I've lost my free workout that I was getting from lifting DL380s all the time :). The celeron boxes are very light by comparison.

Here is the results list for one of these celerons which was increased to 122MHz last weekend and for which the result returned on 22 October is the first at that higher FSB. The previous result was partly at 120MHz and partly at 122MHz. Because of the rather large variation in crunch times within the one frequency band, I can't say that the decrease in crunch time is totally due to the increased FSB but some of it at least will be.

Cheers,
Gary.

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 686042913
RAC: 589795

Hi Gary! Wow, very

Message 69785 in response to message 69783

Hi Gary!

Wow, very impressive indeed! Buying that kind of computers by the pallet is really cool. My electricity budget is now exhausted, unfortunately.

Quote:

If the noise of one or two servers becomes a problem then I guess a stack of six or so would be out of the question :). I've taken a picture of just such a stack and would like to post it here but (never having done this before) am not sure of the possible ways to do it (and what to avoid, etc). Perhaps someone might be kind enough to give me a brief run through on "How best to post images - for dummies 101" thanks :).

That would be cool. Well, you first need to upload the picture to some webspace, and then just link the image in, using [ img ] url [ /img ] tags in the message, and that's it.

CU

Bikeman

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5842
Credit: 109387003472
RAC: 35926537

RE: Buying that kind of

Message 69786 in response to message 69785

Quote:
Buying that kind of computers by the pallet is really cool. My electricity budget is now exhausted, unfortunately.

Those computers from the pallet will never consume any electricity. In fact the bulk has already been recycled and just the valuable bits retained - 2G of server RAM for example not to mention a pair of quite useful 1G slot 1 cpus. People pay good money for those for upgrading existing slower machines.

Quote:
Well, you first need to upload the picture to some webspace, and then just link the image in, using [ img ] url [ /img ] tags in the message, and that's it.

OK, I haven't investigated image hosting webspace so I guess I'd better do that sometime soon :).

Cheers,
Gary.

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 686042913
RAC: 589795

RE: RE: Buying that kind

Message 69787 in response to message 69786

Quote:
Quote:
Buying that kind of computers by the pallet is really cool. My electricity budget is now exhausted, unfortunately.

Those computers from the pallet will never consume any electricity. In fact the bulk has already been recycled and just the valuable bits retained - 2G of server RAM for example not to mention a pair of quite useful 1G slot 1 cpus. People pay good money for those for upgrading existing slower machines.

Quote:
Well, you first need to upload the picture to some webspace, and then just link the image in, using [ img ] url [ /img ] tags in the message, and that's it.

OK, I haven't investigated image hosting webspace so I guess I'd better do that sometime soon :).

Or simply send the images to my e-mail address and I'll upload it on my space, no prob.

CU
H-B

tullio
tullio
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 2118
Credit: 61407735
RAC: 0

I am thinking of buying

I am thinking of buying myself a PS3 with a 40 GB disk for Christmas and loading a SuSE Linux version on it, it is already available on line. I am impressed with the performance of the CELL microprocessor in Folding@home. Then I shall look for a BOINC client on it and hope Einstein@home is available too.
Tullio

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5842
Credit: 109387003472
RAC: 35926537

RE: Or simply send the

Message 69789 in response to message 69787

Quote:
Or simply send the images to my e-mail address and I'll upload it on my space, no prob.

I've taken up Bikeman's kind offer so the image below kindly comes from his webspace. I thought it was quite a coincidence that he chose the dual tualatin 1400 as his "legacy processor of choice" when I've been accumulating tualatins for quite a while now. It's only fairly recently that the dual 1400s have become more readily available and at very cheap prices.

The picture shows six recently commissioned servers. Five are Compaq DL380 G2 dual 1400 boxes and the sixth is a Compaq DL360 which is dual capable but only has one 1266 processor at the moment. It will get the second processor when I pick up a suitable heatsink. The DL360 is wedged in just below the topmost DL380 if you look carefully.

Each 1.4GHz processor out crunches a 2.0GHz P4 by quite a margin so I quite like these particular machines.

Cheers,
Gary.

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 686042913
RAC: 589795

Nice! RE: I thought

Message 69790 in response to message 69789

Nice!

Quote:
I thought it was quite a coincidence that he chose the dual tualatin 1400 as his "legacy processor of choice" when I've been accumulating tualatins for quite a while now. It's only fairly recently that the dual 1400s have become more readily available and at very cheap prices.

Not really a coincidence, Gary, your praise of the Tualatin in earlier threads prompted me to look closer at these CPUs and I was rapidly convinced I wanted one .. or two...or more :-).

I guess it's the curse of the low version number that (luckily) drives the price down on PIII-Ss. "Pentium III" sounds soooo old by now, even tho they are really the direct ancestors of the Pentium M / Core /Core 2 branch of the Intel family, and, as you said, outperform early P4s.

CU
H-B

Edit: P.S.: Those Compaq DL380 G2 boxes are available for 150-250 € on ebay in Germany.

Jim Bailey
Jim Bailey
Joined: 31 Aug 05
Posts: 91
Credit: 1452829
RAC: 0

Just picked up a IBM x440 on

Just picked up a IBM x440 on ebay, it will be here next week. Has 8 1.9Ghz MP Xeons with HT, L3 cache is 1024. It has 2 SMP boards with 4 cpu's on each one connected together with 2 scalability cables. Each board has a cache built in of either 32 or 64MB. It will need a couple more GB's of memory, but PC133r is cheap. Handles memory mirroring and RAID memory. Chip kill is built in on the board so any PC133r will work.

The x255 finally got here today and it is up and running. Finally got all the updates done! It will need more PC2100r memory also.

Nice stack you've got there Gary! Got to love that old iron, I know I do. :)

tullio
tullio
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 2118
Credit: 61407735
RAC: 0

I checked my RDCF on the

I checked my RDCF on the three projects I am contributing on my vintage PII running Linux and they are the following: Einstein 1, QMC 1.2768, SETI 0.496105. Yet SETI insists in assigning me very long deadlines: the latest one is February 11 2008. I have already crunched one third of that WU, with a share of 100, while Einstein is at 300 and QMC at 100. Sounds illogical to me.
Tullio

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 686042913
RAC: 589795

Hi! Does SETI have shorter

Hi!
Does SETI have shorter deadline WUs at all?
CU
Bikeman

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.