F@H SMP on Dual Xeon HT?

[Athlex]

I have a dual-Xeon 2.8GHz box with 4GB RAM running two standard F@H clients- would it be worth switching it over to the SMP client or should I hold off for a quadcore box?

 

[Insidious]

You'll get a much higher score with an SMP client than you will with 2x the standard one.

Things to consider:

You have to put a password on your (Windows) account for it to work right
You have to start F@H manually (shortcut in the startup folder does NOT work!) each you start windows (does not work as a service)
If you have an outage of your network connection at any time it will bork the current WU

But if you can manage the above, you will see a PPD increase of nearly 3X

-Sid

 

[GLeeM]

All of what Sid says and:

Depending on how much L2 cache those procs have you will get at least 800 ppd, more if they have more L2 than my Xeons, I get like 650 ppd at 2.5 Ghz.

 

[Athlex]

Thanks for the info guys, looks like a no brainer. SMP client it is! 🙂

What kind of Xeons are you running GleeM? Sounds like a similar setup to this machine here...

 

[GLeeM]

Originally posted by: Athlex
Thanks for the info guys, looks like a no brainer. SMP client it is! 🙂

What kind of Xeons are you running GleeM? Sounds like a similar setup to this machine here...

IIRC, like three years ago, two for $120, Xeon LV 1.6 Prestonia

OCed to 2.5 (16x156) on an Asus PC-DL with 1 GB OCZ Premium something at 2-2-2-5 timings

 

[Athlex]

Looks like these ones are Cranford (800FSB/1MBL2) Xeons with PC2100 ECC/reg RAM. Does memspeed have much impact on F@H?

Will fire up the SMP client tonight once I can reboot the server.

 

[GLeeM]

Mine only have 512 KB L2 cache.

Yours should do lots better with 1 MB L2 on the SMP WUs.