What Do You Do With Your Idle CPU Time?

[firewolfsm]

Since I leave my computer on for most of the day weather or not I'm using it I seem to have a lot of idle CPU tome. Other than folding what could I do with it? What do you do with it?

 

[43st]

Turn it off.

 

[firewolfsm]

I come back to it all the time, I'm not going to turn it off every hour.

 

[henryay]

Put it on standby, your computer will return to it's previous state in less than 10 seconds. Make sure ACPI is set to S3 in bios for maximum power savings. Everything is shut off except for the data saved in memory.

 

[ForumMaster]

if i don't turn it off, i either put it too sleep in S3 state as henryay said, or CPUIdle is active which shuts down the CPU cutting power consumption as well as keeping it cool.

 

[firewolfsm]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
if i don't turn it off, i either put it too sleep in S3 state as henryay said, or CPUIdle is active which shuts down the CPU cutting power consumption as well as keeping it cool.

What does CPUidle do? Is there a performance hit?

 

[Agentbolt]

sorry double post

 

[Agentbolt]

It runs the HALT command to actively slow down the processor, keeping it cooler. It won't cause a performance hit because it only runs the HALT command when you're not doing anything. It doesn't really save you much power, though.

One thing to keep in mind. specially with the voltage your opty is running at, it's gonna heat up (relatively speaking, I don't know your cooling solution) quite a bit while it's running, which'll in turn lower the life of your processor.

I used to run SETI@home during my computer's downtime, it looked cool and I thought I was helping, but 24/7 running of the processor killed it in a little over a year.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

I shut it off.

 

[firewolfsm]

I've never seen my Opty go over 40C and that's only cuz I bought a seasonic power supply. There's a reason they're so quiet, the fan moves almost no air.

I have an AC Alpine 64 on it now, cheap, simple and quiet.

 

[Eos]

You could go download various Linux distros and seed them 24/7 using bittorrent. Geeks everywhere will love you.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: 43st
Turn it off.

I like this idea.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
Since I leave my computer on for most of the day weather or not I'm using it I seem to have a lot of idle CPU tome. Other than folding what could I do with it? What do you do with it?

My server does folding, defrag when idle (diskeeper), and registry fixes at noon (Tuneup Utilities). My laptop does folding and P2P.

If you have unlimited monthly bandwidth, please support file sharing. It doesn't even need to be illegal files, just start torrent seeding something like a Linux distribution or Open Office, both of which are free and legal to share over P2P. There's always some group out there that could really use your extra bandwidth.
I give all of my bandwidth to the Kademlia network, the network used by eMule.

 

[Thoreau]

Install AMD's Cool n Quiet software, and set it up appropriately. I saw system power draw drop by nearly 60 watts when idle/not under heavy load.

Other than that, my PC doesn't do jack when idle. =)

 

[erickj92]

Put it in hibernate, it shuts everytihng in the pc off and saves all of the stuff that was on your RAM onto your hard drive and you can boot it up again in less than 30 sec. That is what i do.