SETI uncovered a serious problem

[ochadd]

SETI @ home has dug up some serious problems with my rig.

Before I upgraded my CPU I was running an Athlon XP2000(1.667Ghz) and doing work units at 14.5 hours per unit. Which I thought was ok because I had nothing to compare it to.

I just reinstalled SETI for some hardware tests and I am up to about 18 hours per unit with an XP2500(1.8Ghz).

According to the stats on the SETI homepage I should have been doing units at around 4.5 hours for the XP2500 and under 5 hours with the xp2000.

I OCed my processor to an XP2500@2.2Ghz and see no improvement.

3DMark scores are also absolutely terrible. 1500 in 3Dmark03 which is actually worse than my XP2000.

Flashed my bios and started over from scratch with the most recent update but nothing helps.

XP2500@2.2
1Gb DDR333 (512x2 ocsystem and kingston value ram)
Asus A7V333
WD800JB 80Gb 7200rpm and 8Mb cache

I am going to try alternating my RAM chips because I have read some bad things about OC system ram but thought I would see if someone has had this problem.

 

[johnjkr1]

Welcome to the forum ochadd,

What type of video card do you have? Did you install the latest chipset drivers? Is DMA enabled on your drives, do you have any yellow ?'s or !'s in device manager?

 

[ochadd]

Geforece ti4200 128Mb
Audigy2 Platinum sound card

I don't have any errors in the device manager at all. Im not sure if DMA is enabled or not, where do I check/change that?

I updated my video drivers last night and flashed the bios about a month ago.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Post this in the Distributed Computing forum and they will get you straightened out

 

[johnjkr1]

Also, your 3dmark score is right in line with other 2500 cpu's with 4200ti's. I have a 1520 in my database for my old 2500 and 4200ti.

 

[Algere]

R U using the graphical pretty looking version of SETI?

It takes me about somewhat less(12 or so hours/WU) if I use the pretty version of SETI. There's a command line version of SETI(plain looking) that runs in the background which takes about 2-2.5 hours to complete a WU(on my system) since it doesn't waste CPU cycles on displaying those graphs.

 

[ochadd]

I am using the graphical verson. Where would I get the simple version of it?

 

[thermostat]

Just try turning off the seti screen saver and use a blank screen. I believe you will find a highly increased work unit rate. I have 1700+ with a TI4200 and believe me you will be shocked at the difference.

 

[Algere]

SETI CL version (WinXP)

You may wanna couple this with SETISpy and/or SETIQueue to check on WU progress and what not.

EDIT: Meant SETI Driver. Not sure about SETIQueue.

 

[23skidoo]

Algere has pointed you in the right direction: Get rid of the screensaver version. You should be cranking out work units in the 2.5 to 3 hour range with a 2500. To get started with the command-line version and Seti Driver make a new folder on your desktop and name it Seti and download the cl application and Seti Driver to the folder. Double click on the command-line icon and choose to log into your existing account and provide your email addy when prompted. The client will then download a work unit for you and you can then minimize it and run it in the background.

If you've got broadband you could theoretically just let it run in the background and when it completed the first unit it would send to the Berkeley server and get another unit to crunch. However, there is periodical down-time and glitches on the server which is why serious crunchers use a caching program to download a week's worth of work units or so in case the server is out, or if you are running on dial-up and just connect to the server to upload your completed work units and download another batch.

To use Seti Driver you must complete a work unit using the client before it will "see" the necessary log file to do it's thing. Once you've completed that first work unit on the client you can close it out and double click on the blue satellite dish for Seti Driver. You'll then get a red dish upside-down on your tool bar and get the config window. Tick the check boxes for Use Seti Driver, Use 24-hour clock, and Create SETIlog.csv in the Progress Monitoring Section. Leave Maximum Process set to 1, check Hide Processing and Display Transmit boxes, leave the Client Priority set to Low, leave No Proxy/Socks selected, set your Desired Cache Size to 60 (you should be able to crunch 8-10 w/u per 24 hrs with your rig if you run 24/7), Click on Save Config. Whew!! Once you've done that you are ready to release the Beast Within. Click on the Transmit button and you'll get the same DOS pop-up window you got when you started the Client so log into an existing account, enter your account email addy and it's off to the races.

Seti Driver will then download and cache the 60 Work Units and begin crunching the first one downloaded while it's retrieving the others. Your little dish icon in the toolbar will turn green to show it's transmitting. Once it's got the whole batch downloaded it will crunch away and stay blue till it's got a completed w/u and then it turns yellow. You can then let it crunch all 60 and Transmit again. I've found it's best to leave the Auto Transmit box unticked and just dump my completed w/us every few days.

I've usually got 8-10 crunchers running in my Farm at any given moment and have processed over 25,000 work units for my team. Please feel free to PM me with any questions and happy crunching. BTW, out of all the units I've crunched one has been selected for reinvestigation as "promising".