My suggestion, if you can afford it is to go the route of GTX 295 cards, adding more as you can afford it ... but you will need a PSU that can handle three cards ...[/quote]

OK.. lets see... How far will a Kooler Master 650 get me? The GTX 295 are about $400 plus?? Maybe my Tax refund. Any cards made in the US?

[quote]westerj The actual computing work is not done in the BOINC Manager, so whether it is optimized or maximized or midasized doesn't much matter. It runs less then 1% of the time.

As for Rosetta, you might consider increasing your runtimes gradually over time. This setting is in your Rosetta preferences here on the website. This will save the overhead of scheduler hits and file downloads, and just crunch a few more models out of each task. So instead of managing 200 tasks per day to keep the machine busy, you could drop that to 1 task per core. Again, the overhead to manage the tasks and make more scheduler requests is negligable, but it helps the overhead on the project servers too.

Lets look @ CPU before GPU, Howsabout?

I'd been running 4 simultaneous processes, all soaking up a lovely 100Pct of CPU. The assesment of Boinc app doing anything was dumb on my part. The binary is packaged as minirosetta_1.54_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, but shows up as:

file rosetta_beta_5.98_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, stripped

32Bit?
Compiled for 386?

Am I missing something here?

Even the 9600GSO requires a 400 watt power supply, beyond most store bought mahcines of just a couple of years ago. That measn that you not only need to buy a card you need to buy a power suplly too! That could also mean you will be getting into the field of a do-it-yourselfer! Replacing power a supply is NOT hard, they are sorta like chicken mcnuggets, parts is parts! Not totally, but sorta.[/quote]
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Mikey, I have never purchased a system!! Always build em. Its a Asus M3A78-T board, 8 GB@1066, and a radeon 2600XT.The other one is home built too, but from Ebay sources. Such fun! Would like to get CPUs a cranking before messing with Gfx cards, but wont write it off!

Since the code seems to be compiled for 386 and 32 bit... that sounds like a good place to start first!
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westerj there really is no 64bit app on Rosetta. It is a 64bit wrapper of the 32bit app. It basically allows BOINC to send work to 64bit clients, but is running in 32bit mode. Perhaps someone can dig up a link to the thread discussing the potential merits and lack thereof of having a true 64bit version. Bottom line is 64bits isn't always better anyway due to potential other bottlenecks on a machine, and dependancies on the calculations actually performed in the application.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

[quote]Even the 9600GSO requires a 400 watt power supply, beyond most store bought mahcines of just a couple of years ago. That measn that you not only need to buy a card you need to buy a power suplly too! That could also mean you will be getting into the field of a do-it-yourselfer! Replacing power a supply is NOT hard, they are sorta like chicken mcnuggets, parts is parts! Not totally, but sorta.

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Mikey, I have never purchased a system!! Always build em. Its a Asus M3A78-T board, 8 GB@1066, and a radeon 2600XT.The other one is home built too, but from Ebay sources. Such fun! Would like to get CPUs a cranking before messing with Gfx cards, but wont write it off!

Since the code seems to be compiled for 386 and 32 bit... that sounds like a good place to start first!
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Alright, I build my own too! Rosetta does not have GPU processing rightn ow, they are pretty tight lipped about if they will do it in the future. They are 'exploring it', as are most projects. Under Boinc there are only a couple that I can remember that do GPU crunching, Seti and GpuGrid. If you want to go outside of Boinc there is Folding@Home that can use both the Nvidia and ATI video cards. All this is leading to the point of you may not want to rush into the GPU crunching arena just yet, let the dust settle and see which project supports what card and even which model card. What we buy now may not even be supported in a year or so.

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One other project, Milky Way ...

The application is running on windows only, is targeting ATI cards, and is pre-alpha / alpha quality code. If you don't mind care and feeding ... ATI cards are not supported by BOINC yet so the operation is ad-hoc ...

Milky Way has also stated that they have a new intern and she will be working on OpenCL or CUDA version of the application though it would only run on 200 class cards of Nvidia because of the need for double precision ...

{edit}
Other than that I agree, this is not the time to take a dive unless you can afford it ...

OTOH, GPU Grid is pretty stable and some of the lower end Nvidia cards can earn some CS on the side ... I was pretty happy with my $100 9800GT card for some time ...

I recently upgraded from a Athlon 64 X2 5200+ to a Phenom X4 9650 and my computer is reporting roughly twice as many credits now.

I've been running SETI@home on my Geforce 8800GTS 320mb for about two weeks and I'm averaging about 2k credits a day until they started having server issues over the weekend. If you are running CUDA, then I'd recommend using BOINC 6.5.0 (Developmental status).

I just ordered a GTX 260 Core 216 .55nm which should be here tomorrow. :-P

Thanks everyones' thoughts on all this.

Is the consensus here that 64-bit is no help and won't be leveraged, or that the code to optimize the process on AMD64 is not deemed worthy?

In the mean time, I think I'll back off my R@H to 2 cores, and run the other two on a few other projects.

Will look for a 16bit Boinc client maybe too :^).

JW.

Thanks everyones' thoughts on all this.

Is the consensus here that 64-bit is no help and won't be leveraged, or that the code to optimize the process on AMD64 is not deemed worthy?

In the mean time, I think I'll back off my R@H to 2 cores, and run the other two on a few other projects.

Will look for a 16bit Boinc client maybe too :^).
JW.

I am not sure there is a 16 bit client but good luck looking. I am also pretty sure you are correct in your 64 bit versus 32 bit assumption. Very few projects have done a good 64 bit version that is really worthwhile. Paul may be able to give you more help on that, he has run a ton of Boinc projects! As for backing off, that is fine too, each of us has to go where the need to crunch leads us. As long as you keep crunching, the where is not that important, ALL projects can use our help! We all have to go where our hearts and heads lead us.

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ABC and Prime Grid are the two that come to mind. :)