back to $229.99, get it while you can...

Uhm... was I the only one that buys off newegg.com religiously?

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i usually buy most of my stuff from NewEgg, or their sister-site chiefvalue.com, but on Core i7's they have not been competitive with their pricing...

got my i7 920 from buy.com for $225 "out-the-door", and if I had been patient for one more day, i could've had it for $210, no tax, free shipping...

now, x58 mobo's and ddr3 <1.65v's, well, thats another story...

Uhm... was I the only one that buys off newegg.com religiously?

Well, I don't know ... :)

I buy at Frys when possible because it is easier sometimes to be able to look people in the eye ... and they are real good about exchanges and keeping the customer satisfied.

THAT said ... there are many times I also buy on-line ... though I spread my purchases around to where I can get the "best" price ...

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Uhm... was I the only one that buys off newegg.com religiously?

I buy from wherever I can find what I want cheapest, sometimes it is NewEgg, sometimes it is TigerDirect, sometimes local stores can't be beat. I usually do some research and then go looking for what I think I want. I wasn't even looking the other day but found, locally, a 9800GT video card for $150.00. It was a return but was in good shape and all parts were there. It works GREAT! I bought parts for a new quad core system at the same time. It is up and running and is fast, although the video card is in a different system. Got a bunch of other stuff too and only spent $450.00 total. Store always gives me a 10% discount off the top, so I like dealing with them.

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Moved my i7 to Rosetta now recently, somewhat disappointed with the Linux app. It doesnt stress the i7 anywhere near what QMC and Einstein does, dont know if its because Rosettas Linux x86 app is less efficient or if it is less suited for hyperthreading, but i do know the i7 is running significantly cooler now. With Einstein the tubes for the WC system used to be quite warm, almost hot, now barely warm.

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Moved my i7 to Rosetta now recently, somewhat disappointed with the Linux app. It doesnt stress the i7 anywhere near what QMC and Einstein does, dont know if its because Rosettas Linux x86 app is less efficient or if it is less suited for hyperthreading, but i do know the i7 is running significantly cooler now. With Einstein the tubes for the WC system used to be quite warm, almost hot, now barely warm.

Guess: Rosetta@home doesn't use SSE/SSE2/etc, so those parts of the CPU might shut down to conserve power.

But what matters is not how hot your CPU gets but how useful the science that it does is, and afaik, Rosetta@home is tops when it comes to the science.

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Moved my i7 to Rosetta now recently, somewhat disappointed with the Linux app. It doesnt stress the i7 anywhere near what QMC and Einstein does, dont know if its because Rosettas Linux x86 app is less efficient or if it is less suited for hyperthreading, but i do know the i7 is running significantly cooler now. With Einstein the tubes for the WC system used to be quite warm, almost hot, now barely warm.

With the "right" mix of tasks the i7 will be able to process them very efficiently because the two virtual CPUs created with HT share the resources available. If you do "force" all cores to run a project that is almost all FP or all Integer then the two virtual CPUs will contend for the same resources in the core.

That is why it is best to NOT run all one project on HT capable systems. Granted it can seem like a bit of a waste, but, it is truly the best way to get the most out of the processors.

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That do make sense, and i noticed just that yesterday when crunching some Rosetta Beta 5.98 alongside Rosetta Mini 1.48/1.54, coretemp was higher and the Mini1.48 tasks ran ~20 minutes faster.

Another thing i noticed is that Rosetta is considerable more memory intensive than E@H and QMC, that also helps explaining why it doesnt stress the execution cores as much.

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For those thinking of jumping to an i7 based system:
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?threadid=1156121

motherboard and ram and further down in the thread is where to get the cpu. All for under about $700.00!!

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Hello
I have a i7 920 running at 3.42 ghz. Windows sees 8 processors because of H.T.
but nothing I see says that Boinc sees even 4 processors.

13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Processor: 1 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 4]
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Processor features: fpu tsc pae nx sse sse2 mmx
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||OS: Microsoft Windows XP: Professional x86 Editon, Service Pack 3, (05.01.2600.00)
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Memory: 2.99 GB physical, 8.82 GB virtual
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Disk: 149.05 GB total, 121.63 GB free
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Local time is UTC -5 hours
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Not using a proxy
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||CUDA devices found
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Coprocessor: GeForce 9800 GT (1)
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||No general preferences found - using BOINC defaults
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Preferences limit memory usage when active to 1531.52MB
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Preferences limit memory usage when idle to 2756.74MB
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Preferences limit disk usage to 10.00GB
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||This computer is not attached to any projects
13/02/2009 9:55:08 PM||Visit http://boinc.berkeley.edu for instructions
13/02/2009 9:55:20 PM||Fetching configuration file from https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/get_project_config.php
13/02/2009 9:55:57 PM||Running CPU benchmarks
13/02/2009 9:55:57 PM||Suspending computation - running CPU benchmarks
13/02/2009 9:56:04 PM|rosetta@home|Master file download succeeded
13/02/2009 9:56:09 PM|rosetta@home|Sending scheduler request: Project initialization. Requesting 1 seconds of work, reporting 0 completed tasks
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM|rosetta@home|Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||General prefs: from rosetta@home (last modified 04-Apr-2008 22:06:54)
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||Host location: none
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||General prefs: using your defaults
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||Preferences limit memory usage when active to 1531.52MB
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||Preferences limit memory usage when idle to 2450.43MB
13/02/2009 9:56:14 PM||Preferences limit disk usage to 20.00GB
13/02/2009 9:56:16 PM|rosetta@home|Started download of rosetta_beta_5.98_windows_intelx86.exe
13/02/2009 9:56:16 PM|rosetta@home|Started download of 1ffk.vall_torsions.gz
13/02/2009 9:56:19 PM|rosetta@home|Finished download of 1ffk.vall_torsions.gz
13/02/2009 9:56:19 PM|rosetta@home|Started download of avgE_from_pdb.gz
13/02/2009 9:56:20 PM|rosetta@home|Finished download of avgE_from_pdb.gz
13/02/2009 9:56:20 PM|rosetta@home|Started download of bbdep02.May.sortlib.gz
13/02/2009 9:56:30 PM||Benchmark results:
13/02/2009 9:56:30 PM|| Number of CPUs: 1
13/02/2009 9:56:30 PM|| 3646 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
13/02/2009 9:56:30 PM|| 8224 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
13/02/2009 9:56:31 PM||Resuming computation

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BOINC should be reporting:

Processor: 8 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 4]

At least that is the message I get (well, I have a 940 chip, so there are minor differences) ...

Just to be clear, when you call up Task Manager you see 8 columns in the "Performance" tab?

Hello
I have a i7 920 running at 3.42 ghz. Windows sees 8 processors because of H.T.
but nothing I see says that Boinc sees even 4 processors.

13/02/2009 9:56:30 PM|| Number of CPUs: 1

This is near the bottom of that list...Do you have your settings o nthe website or in Boinc itself to use either 100% of the cpu's when set in Boinc, or at least 8 cpu's on the website? On the website you will need to go into your account, computing preferences and then change it there. OR you can go into Boinc itself on your desktop, be careful it will override the website preferences if you click ok!!!, advanced, preferences, processor usage. Near the bottom make sure it is set to 100% and then click ok. As I said this will OVERRIDE any website settings you have. So chose either the website or Boinc but do not use both!!! The website is clearer and easier to figure out for me. If you do the website you will need to go into Boinc and then click projects and click update for the changes to happen right away.

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You guys here may or may not be interested in a very long story about the selection and purchase of a self-built I7 computer and the reasoning given for all components (not to be overclocked but could have been).

Hardware Confusion 2009

It's written by the guy who does the tweakguides site and includes lots of interesting links to the places that helped him decide how to go about his choices.

You may have different priorities yourselves but you can use the same methodology to come to your own conclusion seeing as he details his groundwork.

Seems to be worth the effort for those genuinely interested and only partway through the process.

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Hi,

If anyone is still wanting to look at Core i7 920 performance, I've just attached my recently built system to Rosetta today. There isn't much done yet since I just re-attached a few hours ago, but we'll see how it compares. Note that I have limited my CPU time to 90% because I don't like my CPU temperature to get over about 58c. I'm also using my pc while it's crunching, so that's probably impacting it some too. I do not overclock either. This machine wasn't cheap to build, so I don't want to toast it anytime soon! I'm also running a 64bit version of Vista and 64bit BOINC 6.6.7, so wonder if that will matter much. Anyway, here's a link to my machine if someone wants to monitor, though this page seems to show much less credit than BOINC manager does. Perhaps it is just delayed in updating.

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=1008858

I'll let it run Rosetta for a day perhaps, but will likely then switch to one of the other projects so my CUDA cores can resume being used.

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No need to switch, run GPU Grid on the GPUs and Rosetta on the i7 CPU ... that is what I am doing ...

{edit- add}
Of course I have the i7 940, and two GTX 295 GPUs ... minor details ... 12 tasks and QCN, and FreeHal makes 14 ...

14 tasks, gotta luv efficiency...

14 tasks, gotta luv efficiency...

The only thing that I can think of that is better than my i7 would be two i7s in the same box ...

i'm gonna hafta have rosie wait awhile, i broke down and purchased ($210!) an i7 920. now, i have to save some $$$ for the mobo and ddr3 ram, and build the darn thing. think it'll eventually be worth the effort.

curious to see what 8 virtual cores can do 24/7 for rosie...

i'd be interested to see how good the i7 is on power consumption with Rosie running... should be very good.

It will be a power hog. Here is a link to the i7 tested against a few of it's competitors at Tom's Hardware site. It looks as power consuming as the rest of the high electron drainers.
But it would be very intereting to see if the triple channel DDR3 mated with the i7 cranked out some serious crunching power.
The biggest gains in the i7 seems to be heavy image and video editing and encoding. I bet some movie studios take a serious look at it.

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No need to switch, run GPU Grid on the GPUs and Rosetta on the i7 CPU ... that is what I am doing ...

{edit- add}
Of course I have the i7 940, and two GTX 295 GPUs ... minor details ... 12 tasks and QCN, and FreeHal makes 14 ...

Pretty weak Benchmarking for an i7...

Measured floating point speed: 2937.12 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 7285.15 million ops/sec

My AMD Athlon X2 6400+:

Measured floating point speed: 3235.46 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed: 5813.7 million ops/sec

I expected way more...?

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