and people who care about integrity of their data :D

Okay, I need help with the acronyms... B2B? And HCI Memtest?? Do you mean the memtest built into the Windows Vista/7 CD?

Thanks, I will give HyperPI a try!

Good info to know, I will try this one as well. Thanks!

Stable as in rock stable, stock stable, etc. Anything less than completely stable just leads to data corruption and unexplained errors.

And waste a ton of performace? Is like buying a Tesla Roadster and capping it to 55mph. :D And I've seen stock systems still be unstable for various reasons, regardless.

One Core i7 920 folding four Linux SMP clients (each inside one of four 64bit Ubuntu Virtual Machines) takes about 19 hours for all four SMP programs to cycle once @ 4.2GHz. So say 20 hours = 4x1920 is 7,680 points every 20 hours. PPD results are better than many GPUs. ;-)

But yes, even better to use a GPU or two with the Core i7 as it doesn't affect performance much. This is partly why I am asking, been having nonstop issues with the GPU client, suspecting the GPU core or compute shaders on my GTX 260 might not stable, but have not been able to prove it. :-/ Could just be more F@H GPU code or CUDA driver issues...

That's what my RAID'd NAS is for. Lost to much data to RAID arrays on my desktop, Intel's RAID is no protection at all.

B2B : Back to Back Cas 2 delay (think Asus, MSI and now gigabyte biosses got it)

Read up here : B2B investigated Massman Style

And here : B2B on Gene II

HCI Memtest : download here : hci memtest

I never went deep into the PPD stuff, but my 285GTX folds about 3-5 cores per nite... my 8 cores on the I7 can't keep up with that ! Maybe the CPU get's other heavier assignments, dunno. Not an expert on the matter

Ah, I had read that article on Back to Back CAS delay. :) Gigabyte has not released any BIOS's for the EX58-UD5 in months and I could not find a setting for it, was it under a different name? (I see they just released one, will update and check again).

Thanks for the links, will download the HCI program and play with it.

I'd recommend http://fahmon.net/ Just point it at the GPU directory and the CPU F@H directory to get an idea on your PPD figures... Two Windows SMP clients only fold half as much as four Linux SMP clients, Folding@home code is not optimized very well. Kinda hard to compare cores as the GPU folds quite a few different types, but your GPU should fall between 6,000 to 8,000PPD... same as my Core i7 920. ;)

what TON are you referring to? 2.5% at the most; OCing memory doesn't improve performance noticeably...

not quite, if your system is unstable and you can't SAVE the data CORRECTLY, you can have all the RAID, NAS , SAN, etc in the world, it won't restore the corrupted DATA due to a SYSTEM crash and INSTABILITY.

choosing between ~2% "potential" performance increase, or ROCK STABLE, doesn't crash, doesn't bluescreen, always works, always saves data. IS A NO BRAINER :)
and to be honest, any Dual Core system at 3ghz is plenty fast for anything you throw at it; the only way at this moment to increase performance noticeably is SSD; that will make a difference;
OCing your CPU/VGA/MEM is not worth the risk of an unstable system, for a few % performance increase; In my opinion; to each his/her own :)

leeghoofd, nice catch! That new just released BIOS does unlock the B2B memory setting... doesn't say what it is set to by default though. I guess I'll be spending a bit of time playing with it. :woot:

JMke, you are assuming I was referring to OCing the memory, I am not. Not worth the time, headache, risks involved for the tiny gain. All I am doing is tightening the timings, but I wanted something a bit more accurate than Prime95 Blend to double check my settings.

A 1,560Mhz CPU overclock is "not a few % increase" especially when referring to programs that use all four cores / eight threads. :)

that's why I finished my post with "in my opinion"; I have zero applications which use more than 2 cores, and the apps I do have, few need more than one core. I noticed no real difference between C2D E8200 running at stock vs one overclocked to ~4ghz; running two identical systems, side by side, one overclocked to 4ghz, the other at stock speed; I couldn't tell which one was which until you start up a CPU dependent benchmark.

while I agree with you that single threaded performance increases are the way forward to make our systems fasters, we have run into bottlenecks where a faster CPU does no longer overcome the slowdown, "in ye old days" one could overclock a 300mhz CPU to 600Mhz and the difference in overall computing would be night and day. Today, if we take a 2.66ghz CPU to 4ghz, there is an increase in performance... but nowhere near comparable to the past; we have reach a point of diminishing returns;

the single biggest factor at this point is storage, make that super speedy and you'll be able to feed that overclocked CPU with data it can actually do something with; your i7 @ 4.2Ghz is a monster, but with normal storage you're throwing peanuts at it, by switching to SSD/ramdisk you'll be providing it with a real meal and the outcome will be an eye opener.

Well it sounds like we mostly agree, even I can't notice if my system is at stock or if it is partly overclocked unless I start up an intensive program or several programs at once.

With things like VMWare and its four virtual machines I easily notice the smoother loading and responsiveness between stock and overclocked states. Game levels also tend to load faster even with a basic HDD, oddly I'm usually the first to load in 24 player TF2 servers or 8 player L4D games, but not more disk intensive games. Folding@home is only minimally (at best) affected by disk performance and to a slightly larger extent RAM performance, it's almost completely CPU / GPU bound.

That said an SSD upgrade has been on my list for that very reason, I've just been waiting for the new G2's to be stocked so I can get one for 20% off with Bing cashback. In any case, a system is only as fast as it's slowest bottleneck. It wouldn't make much sense to buy an SSD for a Pentium 4, or a system with 1GB of RAM. Just been waiting for the new 2nd gen drives and some price cuts. :)

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I'll post what I found about Gigabyte's B2B in the appropriate thread. Memtest HCI seems to be stuck at a 2GB limit so three instances must be run simultaneously for it to work. I don't understand what Wprime does that Superpi and Hyperpi don't already?

Wprime stresses all cores as you can manually set the number of threads.

So does Hyperpi :) Wprime is more of a raw CPU test, while Hyperpi and co stresses the rams and IMC more...

HCI memtest is limited inmax ram usage (think it's just the freeware edition) so yes I run several instances too and even attribute affinity for the cores... you run 2 2048 ones and one with rest of the unused memory ( auto )