I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 430 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 22 Stepping 1]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]

Despite the large difference in clock speed, cache and other general advances in micro architecture,
the Celeron defeats the Core2 Duo in both floating point speed and integer speed!

My CPU figures are as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------
Celeron*:
Measured floating point speed: 1730.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3711.3 million ops/sec

Core2 Duo**:
Measured floating point speed: 1205.33 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3673.87 million ops/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

*Runs on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
**Runs on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition, Service Pack 1, (06.01.7601.00)


I did not notice this discrepancy until I looked more carefully into the estimated completion time.
The Celeron was, on average, taking roughly 6 hours to crunch a WU while the Core2 Duo took
about 7 and a half hours on average. To me it seems preposterous!
A low budget CPU from Q2 2007 beating a superior CPU from Q2 2009?

Can someone tell me if there are any tricks/tweaks I can apply to my Core2 Duo to
make it perform better? Which characteristics does Rosetta@Home like in a CPU? Raw
clock speed? Lots of Cache? Faster RAM?

I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 430 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 22 Stepping 1]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]

Despite the large difference in clock speed, cache and other general advances in micro architecture,
the Celeron defeats the Core2 Duo in both floating point speed and integer speed!

My CPU figures are as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------
Celeron*:
Measured floating point speed: 1730.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3711.3 million ops/sec

Core2 Duo**:
Measured floating point speed: 1205.33 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3673.87 million ops/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

*Runs on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
**Runs on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition, Service Pack 1, (06.01.7601.00)


I did not notice this discrepancy until I looked more carefully into the estimated completion time.
The Celeron was, on average, taking roughly 6 hours to crunch a WU while the Core2 Duo took
about 7 and a half hours on average. To me it seems preposterous!
A low budget CPU from Q2 2007 beating a superior CPU from Q2 2009?

Can someone tell me if there are any tricks/tweaks I can apply to my Core2 Duo to
make it perform better? Which characteristics does Rosetta@Home like in a CPU? Raw
clock speed? Lots of Cache? Faster RAM?

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 430 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 22 Stepping 1]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]

Despite the large difference in clock speed, cache and other general advances in micro architecture,
the Celeron defeats the Core2 Duo in both floating point speed and integer speed!

My CPU figures are as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------
Celeron*:
Measured floating point speed: 1730.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3711.3 million ops/sec

Core2 Duo**:
Measured floating point speed: 1205.33 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3673.87 million ops/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

*Runs on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
**Runs on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition, Service Pack 1, (06.01.7601.00)


I did not notice this discrepancy until I looked more carefully into the estimated completion time.
The Celeron was, on average, taking roughly 6 hours to crunch a WU while the Core2 Duo took
about 7 and a half hours on average. To me it seems preposterous!
A low budget CPU from Q2 2007 beating a superior CPU from Q2 2009?

Can someone tell me if there are any tricks/tweaks I can apply to my Core2 Duo to
make it perform better? Which characteristics does Rosetta@Home like in a CPU? Raw
clock speed? Lots of Cache? Faster RAM?

Hi Allan

You can safely ignore the benchmarks and the duration per task! They have little bearing on the Rosetta granted credit. It is calculated from the average of all claimed credit from all of the computers that have already submitted completed work units. The official explanation is here: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=2194#24612.

I just dropped your results pages for the two computers into excel and your Celeron CPU is getting an average credit of 0.003141 per second while your C2D is getting 0.003814 credits per second, per core. The result is, running 24/7 you would see the RAC for the Celeron to be something in the region of 271 credits per day and for the C2D to be around 659, although both might increase if the number of shut-downs is reduced.

Cache seems to make a big difference to Rosetta performance, and it should scale roughly with clock speed for a given CPU architecture, although RAM speed might then become limiting.

As for tips, an easy one would be to try a quick Readyboost USB flash drive or SD card on your Win7 machine. Many people say it's useless when you have more than X GB of RAM but the reality is it's quicker to access small files from than the hard drive and so can benefit any system without an SSD. At least that's my understanding and it seems to help responsiveness, particularly on systems with slow hard drives like laptops.

---

I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 430 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 22 Stepping 1]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]

Despite the large difference in clock speed, cache and other general advances in micro architecture,
the Celeron defeats the Core2 Duo in both floating point speed and integer speed!

My CPU figures are as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------
Celeron*:
Measured floating point speed: 1730.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3711.3 million ops/sec

Core2 Duo**:
Measured floating point speed: 1205.33 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3673.87 million ops/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

*Runs on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
**Runs on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition, Service Pack 1, (06.01.7601.00)


I did not notice this discrepancy until I looked more carefully into the estimated completion time.
The Celeron was, on average, taking roughly 6 hours to crunch a WU while the Core2 Duo took
about 7 and a half hours on average. To me it seems preposterous!
A low budget CPU from Q2 2007 beating a superior CPU from Q2 2009?

Can someone tell me if there are any tricks/tweaks I can apply to my Core2 Duo to
make it perform better? Which characteristics does Rosetta@Home like in a CPU? Raw
clock speed? Lots of Cache? Faster RAM?

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

Go on...

---

I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 430 @ 1.80GHz [Family 6 Model 22 Stepping 1]
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]

Despite the large difference in clock speed, cache and other general advances in micro architecture,
the Celeron defeats the Core2 Duo in both floating point speed and integer speed!

My CPU figures are as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------
Celeron*:
Measured floating point speed: 1730.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3711.3 million ops/sec

Core2 Duo**:
Measured floating point speed: 1205.33 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 3673.87 million ops/sec
-------------------------------------------------------

*Runs on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86 Edition, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
**Runs on Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition, Service Pack 1, (06.01.7601.00)


I did not notice this discrepancy until I looked more carefully into the estimated completion time.
The Celeron was, on average, taking roughly 6 hours to crunch a WU while the Core2 Duo took
about 7 and a half hours on average. To me it seems preposterous!
A low budget CPU from Q2 2007 beating a superior CPU from Q2 2009?

Can someone tell me if there are any tricks/tweaks I can apply to my Core2 Duo to
make it perform better? Which characteristics does Rosetta@Home like in a CPU? Raw
clock speed? Lots of Cache? Faster RAM?

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

It is indeed a laptop. I should have included that. As for the tweaks and tips I will echo Chilean's request to mikey:

Go on...

[quote]I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

It is indeed a laptop. I should have included that. As for the tweaks and tips I will echo Chilean's request to mikey:

Go on...

These directions are Boinc 6.12.26, so modify them to fit your particular version. Okay for the laptop it will NEVER be that much faster than the desktop, laptops are not built for speed they are built for portability. Now for the tweaking...1st turn off any and all screen savers, screen blankers, etc just use the power button when you walk away. Next go into the Boinc Manager, down by the clock, and go to Tools, computing preferences and change a few things. First go to change processor usage and change the line that says "while processor usage is less than [_} percent (0 means no restriction)" and put a zero in the box. Then go up top and check all 3 of the top of boxes...use pc while on batteries, while pc is in use and use the gpu while pc is in use. Click ok at the bottom so your changes here will be saved! Now click on the Disk and memory usage tab and change the time for check pointing to at least 900 seconds, which is 15 minutes. Shorter means the pc is constantly writing to the hard disk, and it is not crunching at 100% while it is doing other things! The next line down talks about the page file (swap space), mine is set to 85%. Next below that is the Memory Usage section...change the 1st line to 85% which is 'while computer is in use', the next line is 'when computer is idle' set that to 90%. Also check the last line to 'leave applications in memory while suspended'. Be sure to check the ok button at the bottom to save the changes!! Do these changes for BOTH pc's and you will see a bump in your crunching RAC.

On the Win7 pc do a right click on the My Computer icon and then click on Advanced System Settings, then advanced then settings. Change the setting from letting Windows chose to 'adjust for best performance'. There are similar settings on the XP pc that do the same thing, but I do not have access to one right now to give you the step by step. Also on the Win7 pc click the start button and in the search bar type "power plan", no quotes of course, chose 'chose a power plan' from the list and change the setting to "high performance".

These are what I do on all of my pc's and it seems to help. As I said though MOST of my pc's are Boinc only, so adjust the settings to what works for you. I would suggest you make one change and see how it affects what you do with your pc. That way if you don't like the change it is easy to go back.

One small piece of advice...on the laptop MAKE SURE you have a backup of the hard drive, not a restore cd, A BACKUP. There are free programs that will make an image of your hard drive and let you restore it to its current status, I use Macrium Reflect, the free version, and do a monthly image of all of my pc's! The reason I say the laptop is because laptop hard drives are not designed for constant 24/7/365 usage like Boinc does. I have replaced mine twice already in 4 1/2 years. Mine is now down to only using 1 of its dual cores and I have had a fan under the laptop for most of its life!

[quote]I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

It is indeed a laptop. I should have included that. As for the tweaks and tips I will echo Chilean's request to mikey:

Go on...

These directions are Boinc 6.12.26, so modify them to fit your particular version. Okay for the laptop it will NEVER be that much faster than the desktop, laptops are not built for speed they are built for portability. Now for the tweaking...1st turn off any and all screen savers, screen blankers, etc just use the power button when you walk away. Next go into the Boinc Manager, down by the clock, and go to Tools, computing preferences and change a few things. First go to change processor usage and change the line that says "while processor usage is less than [_} percent (0 means no restriction)" and put a zero in the box. Then go up top and check all 3 of the top of boxes...use pc while on batteries, while pc is in use and use the gpu while pc is in use. Click ok at the bottom so your changes here will be saved! Now click on the Disk and memory usage tab and change the time for check pointing to at least 900 seconds, which is 15 minutes. Shorter means the pc is constantly writing to the hard disk, and it is not crunching at 100% while it is doing other things! The next line down talks about the page file (swap space), mine is set to 85%. Next below that is the Memory Usage section...change the 1st line to 85% which is 'while computer is in use', the next line is 'when computer is idle' set that to 90%. Also check the last line to 'leave applications in memory while suspended'. Be sure to check the ok button at the bottom to save the changes!! Do these changes for BOTH pc's and you will see a bump in your crunching RAC.

On the Win7 pc do a right click on the My Computer icon and then click on Advanced System Settings, then advanced then settings. Change the setting from letting Windows chose to 'adjust for best performance'. There are similar settings on the XP pc that do the same thing, but I do not have access to one right now to give you the step by step. Also on the Win7 pc click the start button and in the search bar type "power plan", no quotes of course, chose 'chose a power plan' from the list and change the setting to "high performance".

These are what I do on all of my pc's and it seems to help. As I said though MOST of my pc's are Boinc only, so adjust the settings to what works for you. I would suggest you make one change and see how it affects what you do with your pc. That way if you don't like the change it is easy to go back.

One small piece of advice...on the laptop MAKE SURE you have a backup of the hard drive, not a restore cd, A BACKUP. There are free programs that will make an image of your hard drive and let you restore it to its current status, I use Macrium Reflect, the free version, and do a monthly image of all of my pc's! The reason I say the laptop is because laptop hard drives are not designed for constant 24/7/365 usage like Boinc does. I have replaced mine twice already in 4 1/2 years. Mine is now down to only using 1 of its dual cores and I have had a fan under the laptop for most of its life!

I haven't disabled any of my PC's "graphics" in favor of speed since WinXP. Is there any measurable speed gain by switching? I thought Aero tasked the GPU more than any.

---

[quote]I have two computers crunching WUs and they are wildly very different:

Is the T6500 a laptop by chance? There are lots of tweaks and tips to make Boinc run faster but it depends on whether these pc's are daily usage machine or just crunchers on how aggressive you want to be.

It is indeed a laptop. I should have included that. As for the tweaks and tips I will echo Chilean's request to mikey:

Go on...

These directions are Boinc 6.12.26, so modify them to fit your particular version. Okay for the laptop it will NEVER be that much faster than the desktop, laptops are not built for speed they are built for portability. Now for the tweaking...1st turn off any and all screen savers, screen blankers, etc just use the power button when you walk away. Next go into the Boinc Manager, down by the clock, and go to Tools, computing preferences and change a few things. First go to change processor usage and change the line that says "while processor usage is less than [_} percent (0 means no restriction)" and put a zero in the box. Then go up top and check all 3 of the top of boxes...use pc while on batteries, while pc is in use and use the gpu while pc is in use. Click ok at the bottom so your changes here will be saved! Now click on the Disk and memory usage tab and change the time for check pointing to at least 900 seconds, which is 15 minutes. Shorter means the pc is constantly writing to the hard disk, and it is not crunching at 100% while it is doing other things! The next line down talks about the page file (swap space), mine is set to 85%. Next below that is the Memory Usage section...change the 1st line to 85% which is 'while computer is in use', the next line is 'when computer is idle' set that to 90%. Also check the last line to 'leave applications in memory while suspended'. Be sure to check the ok button at the bottom to save the changes!! Do these changes for BOTH pc's and you will see a bump in your crunching RAC.

On the Win7 pc do a right click on the My Computer icon and then click on Advanced System Settings, then advanced then settings. Change the setting from letting Windows chose to 'adjust for best performance'. There are similar settings on the XP pc that do the same thing, but I do not have access to one right now to give you the step by step. Also on the Win7 pc click the start button and in the search bar type "power plan", no quotes of course, chose 'chose a power plan' from the list and change the setting to "high performance".

These are what I do on all of my pc's and it seems to help. As I said though MOST of my pc's are Boinc only, so adjust the settings to what works for you. I would suggest you make one change and see how it affects what you do with your pc. That way if you don't like the change it is easy to go back.

One small piece of advice...on the laptop MAKE SURE you have a backup of the hard drive, not a restore cd, A BACKUP. There are free programs that will make an image of your hard drive and let you restore it to its current status, I use Macrium Reflect, the free version, and do a monthly image of all of my pc's! The reason I say the laptop is because laptop hard drives are not designed for constant 24/7/365 usage like Boinc does. I have replaced mine twice already in 4 1/2 years. Mine is now down to only using 1 of its dual cores and I have had a fan under the laptop for most of its life!

I haven't disabled any of my PC's "graphics" in favor of speed since WinXP. Is there any measurable speed gain by switching? I thought Aero tasked the GPU more than any.

The only way to know for sure is to do it and test the differences, but basically for a Boinc only machine YES it is worth it, for a machine you use for other things maybe not, it kind of depends on what else you do. And yes Aero tasks the gpu alot!