Seti & Alphas

[Diffusion]

I have heard that DEC (Now Compaq) Alpha machines crunch through seti blocks at a tremendous rate. Now, I was looking at my next machine (Either an UltraSparc 5 or a used Alpha system) and I found a site selling 4 way Alphas for as low as 495$ (4x166), I'm not interested in this, but surely one of you Seti freaks (I prefer RC5 😉) will want one workstation.net, click on the digital link. Yeah, they only have 32mb of ram and a 1gb hd, but as a dedicated seti machine would that make a difference?

 

[Fardringle]

The Hard Drive size wouldn't matter, but the memory could definitely be a problem, since each instance of the client uses about 16MB of RAM... Still, could be a fun machine to add to the cause! 😉

 

[Poof]

Diffusion - egghead.com has some better faster refurbished alphas, ie., 21164s w/433 or 500Mhz processors (which can be upgraded up to 600Mhz, although upgrade processors are exhorbitant the last time I checked). I had gotten my 433 from them back around April. It does a 2.x WU in about 8.5 hrs (there's no 3.x for alpha linux yet, so.... tap tap tap).

Here's what they have:

One
Two
Three

 

[Diffusion]

Yeah, however, 500$ is cheap, 1200$ is more then I pay for my primary machines these days, good deal though.

 

[Poof]

True, but it's the cool factor.... 😎

And those 166s will only give you around the same WU times as a P166... 🙁 You'd be lucky to maybe get 2 WUs/day out of that quad with 3.03! :|

The one that's $999 is what I have (paid more for it back in the spring though). At least I can get some respectable times out of it. 🙂