30 day "challenge" comes to an end

[Aussie]

30 days of folding has come to and end and I've now switched my dual box back to folding under the Aussie username, it accumulated 2657 points in the thirty days.

My Barton box is still crunching a 70 point Tinker, it was aprox halfway through this work unit when the deadline passed so it will have to have 35 points deducted from its final score which should result in a net score of 2428 points for the thirty days of folding. As soon as it completes this work unit I will also switch it back to folding under the Aussie username.

This experiment has posed more questions than it answered and I am now very keen to learn more about the effect of on-board cache and FSB/memory speed on folding output.

As soon as I can find the time to put together a couple more boxes I will be carrying out further experiments to compare the folding output of various processors.


Aussie

[Southwind25]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks to me with only a little over 200 points between them and the dual machine having a large advantage in MHz's, that the onboard cache and faster memory of the Barton did pretty well. What are your conclusions , Aussie?

[Aussie]

That is precisely why I said that this experiment posed more questions than it answered.

The dual box has two processors running at 2000MHz on a 133MHz FSB (266MHz DDR), each of the processors has 256Kb of on-board cache, the memory (1Gb) is ECC which is lower performing than non buffered memory and the board itself is a server/workstation board designed for stability and reliability.

The Barton has a single processor running at 2200MHz on a 200MHz FSB (400MHz DDR) and has 512Kb of on-board cache, 512Mb of non buffered memory is used and the board is designed for top performance.

Both machines are running WinXP Pro and using the 3.25 beta console client with the same flags ( 2 clients in the case of the dual box).

I would like to get an Athlon 2400+ and overclock it to 2200MHz @ 200MHz FSB on the same board to see what difference the on-board cache makes. I would also like to clock the Barton 2500+ down to a 133MHz FSB while keeping its clock speed @ 2200MHz to see the effect that FSB/memory speed has on output.

I also have some plans to test P4 and Celeron CPU's.


Aussie

[J.C.GARCIA]

i have two days to go to complete my second full month , score 6123 and will upload a 70 pointer today and another tommorrow

[Peanya]

I think we already know the answer to your questions about the Barton vs the T-bred. The AMD processors get their biggest benefit from more memory bandwidth. This is due to the shorter pipelines than the P4. If you take a Barton (or Tbred for that matter) and drop that FSB to 100 while keeping the core the same, you'll see a huge performance hit.
The extra cache memory will boost its performance if you have a high FSB.
The P4, on the other hand, will also yield a performance increase with a higher FSB, but not as much. Because of the longer pipelines, the P4 gets the biggest benefit from a larget cache and core speed. If you had access to an unlocked P4, that'd be a good way to prove it.
Now the new AMD64 is a mixture of both, although still closer to the Athlon XP. The on board memory controller will prove to be a big benefit, and detriment to the new 64 platform. The positive is obvious: better bandwidth and far lower latency (1/2 of the 875 chipset!!!). The negative part is the inability to change as newer memory types come out. I'm pretty confident AMD will change the 64 for when DDR2 becomes the dominant memory (just when though?)

[Southwind25]

i have two days to go to complete my second full month , score 6123 and will upload a 70 pointer today and another tommorrow

J.C.,
I've been impressed with what you're 2 machines have done. You've been a great asset. I for one , Thank You.

[Tulatin]

As another, i thank you. It's thanks to people like you who toss in they're resources and give it they're all that we're nearing 150 fast.

[J.C.GARCIA]

err , dont thank me , thank the team . its all smurf pimp's fault . he was gonna send some goons around if i didnt oblige

[Tulatin]

LOL! I suppose the best way to increase membership is to ask and to suggest.

[J.C.GARCIA]

correct