TPU's WCG/BOINC Team

[[Ion]]

Those certainly make great crunchers. At $300 I'm not sure of the value proposition any more (I set mine up for about half that). But they're small, basically silent, easy to configure, and impressively stable. Not hard at all to get a month of two of uptime out of them. ~3800 PPD isnt great, but it's certainly not bad either, and that's almost 1.4M points over the course of a year

 

[hat]

I have plans to bring a q6600 online along side my i5 2400. There will be no over clocking, though. The 650i boars does not like quads! I tried, even tried the bsel mod.

At least it will be a dedicated cruncher. I'm gonna try folding on the gt720 I stuck in it though so that'll eat up a core unfortunately. I don't understand why fah GPU eats CPU power like this... I don't remember it doing this.

 

[hat]

The Q6600 is running. The GT720 is folding, but only at 420 PPD (??) I'm going to watch it and see what happens.

 

[Nordic]

So team, I am working on this computer for a friend. It has an i3-3220 in it. It is a dell prebuilt. I am fixing it for free, and in return he will run boinc 24/7 for me. Troubleshooting it, the hardware seems just fine. I can not find anything wrong. I can not boot into windows, or repair windows, and will have to re install windows. I can find specific folders, such as C:\users\UserName is corrupted. This computer was hardly ever used. All it had for software installed was chrome and antivirus.

The computer is 3 years old almost exactly. I have heard before that big names like Dell sabotage their computers after 3 years to spur sales. I never really thought much of it, but I can not see any reason this PC should of failed or have a corrupt hdd. What are your thoughts?

 

[twilyth]

A significant percentage of hard drives fail after a couple of years with some manufacturers having stats that are significantly worse than other. I'd run a diagnostic on the drive to make sure it's actually functioning w/in spec before you go any further.

If that's not the problem, I'd do a full reformat and re-install.

 

[stinger608]

A significant percentage of hard drives fail after a couple of years with some manufacturers having stats that are significantly worse than other. I'd run a diagnostic on the drive to make sure it's actually functioning w/in spec before you go any further.

If that's not the problem, I'd do a full reformat and re-install.

And from what I have seen, Dell is one of the worst for using "sub par" quality hardware in their systems!

 

[Nordic]

A significant percentage of hard drives fail after a couple of years with some manufacturers having stats that are significantly worse than other. I'd run a diagnostic on the drive to make sure it's actually functioning w/in spec before you go any further.

If that's not the problem, I'd do a full reformat and re-install.

I have done a series of tests on every piece of hardware. Everything seems to be functioning. Once I get windows installed again I can do more thorough testing, but that is proving difficult.
These dell bios are such crap. I have to fight my way into them. It never wants to boot from the correct device. For some reason it keeps choosing the cdrom drive although nothing is there.

I am excited to get this fixed though. That is a 3ghz dual core i3-3220 I will have crunching for me, and not have to pay the power for if my friend actually follows through and runs it consistently.



Edit:
On a related note. Playing with the g1620 celeron and this h61 board, I am unable to downvolt as much as I could on a p67 board. Better board in this case down equal better undervolting. On my p67 I would downvolt to 0.8v, and probably could of went further. This would drop the cpu power used from 14w to 8w measured with HWinfo and confirmed with KillAWatt. Once, if, I get this itx board stable I will be curious to see its power usage compared to the 60w the p67 board put out with this cpu.

 

[twilyth]

It might be worth pulling the drive and putting into an external dock to run those additional tests.

It might be trying to boot from the cdrom because the hdd is borked. You can try booting from a utility cd to do the tests though. I'm guessing that's what you've already tried though.

But if you're booting from a cd and still can't run the diagnostics you want, there may be a problem with the main board. In that case, you're going to have to get into the guts anyway in order to isolate the problem

 

[t_ski]

I have done a series of tests on every piece of hardware. Everything seems to be functioning. Once I get windows installed again I can do more thorough testing, but that is proving difficult.
These dell bios are such crap. I have to fight my way into them. It never wants to boot from the correct device. For some reason it keeps choosing the cdrom drive although nothing is there.

Can you reset the BIOS?

 

[Nordic]

It might be worth pulling the drive and putting into an external dock to run those additional tests.

It might be trying to boot from the cdrom because the hdd is borked. You can try booting from a utility cd to do the tests though. I'm guessing that's what you've already tried though.

But if you're booting from a cd and still can't run the diagnostics you want, there may be a problem with the main board. In that case, you're going to have to get into the guts anyway in order to isolate the problem

I am booting from USB. HDD testing I have done so far is check smart and run a check disc command in command prompt from the recovery tools. I am seeing if I can install windows, and from there I like the program Windows Surface Scanner. I am preparing to do some tests with hirens boot cd here soon for more thorough testing...

Can you reset the BIOS?

Took me forever to figure out how to get into the bios. They were locked. Resetting the cmos didn't unlock the bios. Then I found a little jumper that had tiny little letters saying "Password reset." So yes I have reset the bios.

Working on two computers, while doing other household chores so nothing is getting too direct attention.

 

[Toothless]

Update!

I managed to sneak on the "free hour" for the Comcast wifi and got another job app done. If I wanted the wifi (it's pretty decent and gets the job done) then I'd have to drop $20 or $25 a week. The price hurts.

I'll keep you guys updated as much as I can!

 

[xvi]

Update!

I managed to sneak on the "free hour" for the Comcast wifi and got another job app done. If I wanted the wifi (it's pretty decent and gets the job done) then I'd have to drop $20 or $25 a week. The price hurts.

I'll keep you guys updated as much as I can!

*ahem*
....
*A-HEM*

 

[Toothless]

*ahem*
....
*A-HEM*

And how would one access these? They don't pop up on my list of network choices yet there are many. MANY choices according to the site.

 

[twilyth]

There are aerial antennas that you can get for your router or wireless ethernet card that will increase your range. Also, adapters - something like this for example.

 

[Toothless]

If only I had the money to grab one.

 

[xvi]

We use these at work. They'll pick up a home router from 10+ miles away with clear line of sight. Get a nice antenna on the router and it might do 20 miles. (Router needs to be capable of VERY high ACK timeouts though.)

The very inexpensive version of this is a cantenna. There's also cheap directional antennas on eBay.

 

[twilyth]

If only I had the money to grab one.

It's only about 20 bucks. But if that's too much, you can always put together a can-tenna as @xvi pointed out. The only cost there is the cable which I'm sure someone here has.

 

[Toothless]

The cantenna gave me quite a laugh. It's so cute!

I'll look around to see if I can find a few bucks around the house. I'm sure Goodwill will have one?

 

[AlienIsGOD]

i'm so in love with the X41 eventually i need to buy some RAM heatsinks to cover the VRM's as i ve read they can get pretty hot on some cards.

 

[Nordic]

Athlon 4400 highest day so far was a bit over 800 ppd. It then fell back to about 500 ppd. If this dual core cpu usually performs at 1500 ish ppd as @mad shot mentioned, then I think the cheap hp motherboard is holding it back.

 

[ThE_MaD_ShOt]

Athlon 4400 highest day so far was a bit over 800 ppd. It then fell back to about 500 ppd. If this dual core cpu usually performs at 1500 ish ppd as @mad shot mentioned, then I think the cheap hp motherboard is holding it back.

Ill fire mine back up tomorrow evening if I have a psu for it and see what it does.

 

[[Ion]]

Athlon 4400 highest day so far was a bit over 800 ppd. It then fell back to about 500 ppd. If this dual core cpu usually performs at 1500 ish ppd as @mad shot mentioned, then I think the cheap hp motherboard is holding it back.

1500 PPD seems a bit high to expect....I'm getting about 1450 from an E8500 (second-best C2D) running Linux with no GUI....the Athlon I'd expect probably 800-900 from. The Brisbane cores just aren't as good as Wolfdale.

Also, does anyone have a long (25-30ft) Ethernet cable they'd sell me? After tripping on the one across the floor once again, I'd like to reroute it

 

[Nordic]

1500 PPD seems a bit high to expect....I'm getting about 1450 from an E8500 (second-best C2D) running Linux with no GUI....the Athlon I'd expect probably 800-900 from. The Brisbane cores just aren't as good as Wolfdale.

Sounded so, because my athlon 620 quad core gets just under 2000 ppd. Even still, if I am getting 500/800 ppd that is underperforming which I would not be surprised by this old cheap proprietary hp motherboard.

 

[[Ion]]

Sounded so, because my athlon 620 quad core gets just under 2000 ppd. Even still, if I am getting 500/800 ppd that is underperforming which I would not be surprised by this old cheap proprietary hp motherboard.

Eh I don't think that motherboards impact it at all. All of the HPs I have do fine (admittedly, newer)....even the laptops do basically exactly what I'd expect given the CPU. And the E8500 I have is running in a Dell board. What's the OS?

 

[Nordic]

Windows 7 x64. Been thinking about moving it to linux, but I really don't see the point if I don't plan on running it for long. Been running it for nostalgia and I needed some hardware to play with. It was my first gaming/crunching system.