Crunching on E2xxx

[narreth]

Do any of you guys have an E2xxx CPU OC'd ( or at stock, whichever) crunching? How is it at crunching?/show me your stats page?

 

[ZebuluniteV]

Originally posted by: narreth
Do any of you guys have an E2xxx CPU OC'd ( or at stock, whichever) crunching? How is it at crunching?/show me your stats page?

I just recently build a system with an E2180 overclocked to 3GHz. It gets about 1550PPD, while my laptop (Vostro 1400) gets 1050PPD (well, theoretically would if I ran it 24/7) running with a Core 2 @ 1.6GHz (with 2MB cache vs the E2xxx's 1mb).

So unless Windows XP 64-bit is doing something weird, it seems that Folding@Home (at least the SMP client) really likes cache memory on the Core 2s, given that the E2180 system is running at nearly double the clockspeed as the laptop.

Additionally I observed that I gained a 80PPD or so increase from running the memory asynchronously at DDR2-750 (verses running it at DDR2-600 to match up with my current 300MHz bus speed).


So, to summarize - it seems that the E2xxx suffer in F@H due to a lack of cache memory, and that perhaps as a result running the memory as fast as possible does give a noticeable benefit.


Note - both the laptop and the E2180 systems are running with SMP affinity changer, which at least on the laptop increases PPD by over 100 points (haven't measured the desktop without it, so I'm not sure what increase it has there).

Edit - Also, if it helps, by comparison my old Athlon 64 X2 (socket 939) system running at 2.6GHz got about 1020PPD, so while the E2xxx seems to lag due to cache compared to other Core 2 processors, its by no means slow in F@H.