PIII 450 Outperforms Duron 978?

[Dyflam]

I was wondering if someone could explain why my PIII 450 at work completes a Seti@home block in about 8 hrs. and my Duron 600 OC'd to 978 takes about 10 hrs.

 

[BreakApart]

The work computer has less background programs running. Chances are you have too much junk installed on the home computer, or it is not tweaked to remove the background reminders, auto-starting programs, etc... All this type of stuff interferes with the SETI client...

BTW--this post would be best answered in the "Distributed Computing" forum...

 

[Galadala]

You must have a mighty slack system at home bud because my system (listed below) completes a SETI@Home block in less that 5 hours...

 

[tweakr]

SETI@home likes L2 cache size over all else in a CPU. I've seen a PII-266 outperform my old Celeron366@550, purely because it had 4x the L2 cache availible. Same is true of a Duron - this is why Galada's TBird performs well, despite having much the same core as a Duron - it has a larger L2 cache, thus SETI can hold all it's data in the L2 cache, and is much faster because of it. Your PIII-450 has far more level2 cache availible, and despite running slower than your Duron, it will always win out on SETI. I imagine one of the old Xeons with 1mb+ of full-speed cache would be about the fastest X86 Cpu for SETI ('course you can't beat an Alpha for SETI crunching... )

cheers
tweakr

 

[jinsonxu]

What client version are you using? Using the CLI or GUI version?

BTW My Duron 1Ghz did an 8H WU time using the 2x GUI client. Sucked big time huh?

 

[spamboy]

Good call, tweakr. My PII 400 is faster than my Celeron 566, when it's clocked to 566 anyway. At 884, it's faster, especially since v. 3.0 came out, which can on a smaller cache.

 

[Dyflam]

Thanks for making sense of this for me everyone.

 

[Poof]

Dyflam - I hate to add some more to this thread but regarding v 3.0... L2 cache size is no longer an issue (ie., my dual Xeon II 400 1Mb now SUCKS w/v. 3.0 as compared to 2.x), the working set of the 3.0 client *will* fit in the coppermine PIII's 256K cache whereas 2.4's needed something like 800K of cache. The Duron's total cache is naturally a bit smaller than the PIII (ie., the T-bird is more comparable to the PIII). However cache *speed* seems to help along with FSB speed.

Your PIII 450 should be katmai core with half-speed 512K cache, but the Duron does have full speed cache (192K total I believe?), so you'd expect it to do better. But, since the AMD's run on a Via chipset, you're not processing to your full ability unfortunately. There's some tweeking that you can do using H. Oda's tools, that would speed up your times on that Duron, ie., by enabling 4-way memory interleaving.

So you do have some room for improvement - check over on Distibuted computing and folks can help you.

 

[Assimilator1]

Dyflam

As poof said ,+ your Duron would be MUCH faster than the PIII 450 if you were to switch to v3.0.You could then expect to get WU times of around 5 hrs or so.

BTW to all the guys who are running SETI ,are you on a team? (Poof I know you are ) ,if not then why not join Team Anandtech SETI? ,headover to the Distrib Comp forum for more info or check out my sig

 

[R0b0tN1k]

Bah...SETI is a waste of time. Nobody will find anything. With RC5, you're at least contributing towards a useful cause.

 

[Fardringle]

Spending 2+ years to crack an encryption code is useful? ("We need to decode this Top Secret, Urgent message!" "Yes, Sir! Just give me a few years and I'll have it for you!&quot

We do SETI for the same reason you do RC5 - because we ENJOY it! Does a DC project have to be 'useful' in order for people to want to participate? No! Would I participate in a DC project that actually had the potential to "save the world"? Maybe, if it was organized well enough, and if there was a TA team for it..

 

[NOS440]

Its simple it has INTEL inside LOL

 

[Dyflam]

Thanks for the feedback everyone... much appreciated.

Seti@home website doesn't offer ver. 3.0, only 2.04 for Windows OS's.

 

[Assimilator1]

Dyflam

You can still get v3.0 Cli (text verison) from SETI ,the GUI v3.0 was pulled due to some minor bugs.But you could get it from one of out TA members.
BTW what team are you on?

R0b0tN1k

How can attempting to find Alien life be a waste of time!? ,1 day ,eventually some one will find something .If we don't start then we'll NEVER find anything.
And aside from helping TA ,what cause are you contributing by running RC5? lol

Enjoy what you run & don't slag off other projects