Looking at a possible upgrade soon

S

SmokeRngs

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2008
Joined
Aug 9, 2001
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I may be selling my A7N8x-Deluxe rev 1.0x and XP2400+ @2300 to a friend soon. The deal has actually been in the works for a few months now but nothing has gone through on his end to get some money.

I was originally going to get a DFI nForce II LanParty B and mobile Barton and try to overclock the crap out of it.

Depending on what motherboards are out if the sale ever goes through, I was thinking about going with an Athlon64 instead. I know it's going to cost me a lot more than the original combo. I was thinking about going with the A64 3000+ or A64 3200+. I was also hoping to grab a good nForce3 250 chipset socket 754 board to go with it.

I'm wondering what the difference would be in folding speeds of the XP running around 2.4-2.5 Ghz vs the A64 running at whatever I could get it overclocked to.

I was hoping someone may have already done a switch similar to what I'm describing and has some first hand knowledge on this. If anyone knows a site that has some benches between the XP and the A64 using folding, I would appreciate it.

As it is, I'm just wondering if I really want to spend the extra money to go with the A64 if I even have enough extra to do it. That, and I'd just like to know anyway.

Folding is the primary thing my system does since I'm usually at work or taking care of my kid. Hopefully I'll be able to get him a system to mess around with before too long and get it folding too. I plan on starting him early.
 
I have a 3200-64 running at 2100 as well as a few barton 2500s running at 2.2 2.3 or so. The bartons are faster with folding. The 64 is killer at gaming. I love my 64 though..very smooth. Folding is very much about cpu speed. If you have the spare cash and want to be bleeding edge go for it..newer always is fun and feels good. Keep in mind however, you can do two barton machines for the price of a nice 64 bit machine. Just a thought ;)

Fold on

BillR
 
BillR said:
I have a 3200-64 running at 2100 as well as a few barton 2500s running at 2.2 2.3 or so. The bartons are faster with folding. The 64 is killer at gaming. I love my 64 though..very smooth. Folding is very much about cpu speed. If you have the spare cash and want to be bleeding edge go for it..newer always is fun and feels good. Keep in mind however, you can do two barton machines for the price of a nice 64 bit machine. Just a thought ;)

Fold on

BillR
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I was thinking folding had a lot to do with clock speed.

I would like to go with A64 but the price is keeping me away. I though that if it folded a lot better than a Barton then I would see if I could find the money and go for that.

I do realize that for a decent A64 system I could probably build a couple of Barton systems and I have thought about doing it if I could. If I'm able to get the money soon that a guy owes me for my old A7V266-e, XP1800+, RAM and a couple other things along with the money for my current stuff then I would probably try and build a second system for folding only. I have some of the stuff already, just not as much as I used to.

I guess I'll just have to see about getting the parts I need for a barebones, headless system.

It would still be nice getting an A64 system, though.
 
Make sure you factor in the increased heat and electricity of 2 Bartons vs 1 A64 also. If you're going to use the A64 as a main machine, and do a lot of gaming, you might as well get the A64, with folding as a secondary activity. That's what I do.

I'm patiently waiting for the 90nm processors in the fall/winter. Should be much faster...
 
Bill Clo said:
Make sure you factor in the increased heat and electricity of 2 Bartons vs 1 A64 also. If you're going to use the A64 as a main machine, and do a lot of gaming, you might as well get the A64, with folding as a secondary activity. That's what I do.

I'm patiently waiting for the 90nm processors in the fall/winter. Should be much faster...
Click to expand...

Right now I don't do much gaming. I prefer on line gaming and with the lousy dialup I'm on, it's impossible to do. I also don't have much time to do much gaming anyway at the moment. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to pick it up again. If that was the concern, then I would definitely go with the A64.

As far as power goes, I'm not too worried about that. The systems don't really add much to the electric bill when compared to everything else in the house that's running. A few bucks more a month isn't really going to bother me. Besides, about the only thing grabbing power will be the CPU. There won't be much of anything else in the system for now. Later on after I get a bit more money I'll add some components and let my son use the system. For now, the second system would just be a folding box.

I do worry a bit about the heat problems with the extra box. I have the hottest room in the house as it is but for the moment I seem to have everything under control as long as the temp outside stays below 95 degrees. Besides, if need be, I'll grab the window A/C unit and start running it. I think the headless Barton system probably wouldn't add too much in the way of heat especially if it's a mobile and I don't crank the vcore up too much. I know that my T-bred runs a lot cooler if I have the vcore down but I don't get as much of a stable overclock out of it. Since it won't be my main box, I probably won't run it at a max overclock either. At least not while it's rather warm outside.
 
I know that people say that folding scales better with processor speed, but, my mobile barton @ 2.45 almost always shows a higher PPW score in EMIII than my presHOT @ 2.8! I don't know of any other way to gage FAH production, but it sure looks like I won't be migrating to 90nm anytime soon. Especially @ the prices Intel & AMD are charging. No significant increase in perfomance for 2 to 3 times the price, who do those guys think they're fooling. Not only is Moore's Law dead, its putrefying!!!
 
I just had another thought SmokRngs, I too have an A7V266e. As we speak it's running a barton at 2.2. The very latest bios sees the newer cpus. Buy one chip (Barton) have that second computer at a very nice speed.

Just a thought

BillR
 
jaSihr said:
I know that people say that folding scales better with processor speed, but, my mobile barton @ 2.45 almost always shows a higher PPW score in EMIII than my presHOT @ 2.8! I don't know of any other way to gage FAH production, but it sure looks like I won't be migrating to 90nm anytime soon. Especially @ the prices Intel & AMD are charging. No significant increase in perfomance for 2 to 3 times the price, who do those guys think they're fooling. Not only is Moore's Law dead, its putrefying!!!
Click to expand...

When making comparisons like scaling with clock speed, I generally try and stay within the same processor family or sometimes go out on a limb like the Bartons vs A64. I generally stay away from the clock speed scaling comparisons when talking AMD vs Intel. As we all know, the Athlons have a much better IPC against the P4s in most cases and that throws off the "fair" comparisons. It's also one of the reasons I have gone with AMD over the past serveral years. I like efficiency and the price has also been a major factor. That's why I have questioned getting the A64. I'd love to have it mess around with. But at this time, the price doesn't seem to be worth it especially since the main thing my box does anymore is fold.

I was hoping for some nice priced A64s on socket 939 but that hasn't happened yet. The 754 pin A64s are also a bit much more than I really have to spend. I just hope I can get the money to upgrade my current box a bit to a mobile Barton and put together a barebones second mobile Barton box just for folding for now.

Maybe in a year or so, I might be able to pick up a couple A64s on a dual board sporting the nForce3 250 chipset. That is, if the rumors I heard are true and the chipset does support dual processors at a decent price.
 
Going with the mobile Barton is certainly your most cost effective choice. With the Koolance you should get up to 2.6 or 2.8. Mine gets 2.45 with an Alpha PAL8045 and a relatively quite fan. I've got a RBX that I haven't installed yet, I hope I can get another 400 MHz when the WC is put together. If you get the DFI and end up getting new ram, I'd personally recommend the Mushkin 2-2-2 special. I love mine, I've run it up to 2.9v and it doesn't get hot. It goes up to 225 MHz with the timings at the low default settings w/o any problems. I've not done the L11 fix yet so I can't personally tell you about speeds above 225. I don't need it yet because I'm not getting over 2.5 w/o the WC. As for the PresHOT, its a 2.4A, I picked it up after reading Kyle's review. Its running in a MSI PT880, $63 for the MB and $104 for the CPU, both at Newegg, all the other components I allready had. I think <$170 for the system isn't bad. First Intell system I've built since 99 (Wow, last century!), a relatively cheap combo for an Intell system. It just doesn't fold as well as I had expected considering what I keep hearing about P4's and Gromacs. Doesn't OC as well as I expected either, probably should have gotten a 2.4C.
 
I'm planning on hitting up newegg for a mobile Barton at this point. I just can't justify an A64 at this time. I'm hoping to hit pretty good speeds with the Koolance, as it's not doing too bad right now on my old Tbred-B.

The current RAM I'm using I will be keeping. It's a 512 stick of Corsair XMS PC3500 C2. I haven't really had a chance to push it since the highest I am currently able to go with my ver 1.0x A7N8x-Deluxe is 208 FSB. Right now with the temps rising outside I can't even run that. Right now I'm at 202 or 203 for the FSB. I was thinking about getting better cooling than the stock for the northbridge but since I'm probably going to be selling this motherboard anyway, I couldn't justify the cost. Not to mention, I've probably been able to get the best out of this motherboard as it is. The speeds I've been able to get out of it are probably on the upper end of the range for the eariler nForce2 chipsets.
 
I had one of the early A7N8X, until it self-destructed. I really wasn't impressed. It gave me fits trying to get high FSB. At least it died for a good cause. If you get another nForce2 board, and you should, you should pick up a second stick of that ram. One gig is always nice and dual channel too! Koolance has some coolers that are suitable for the nForce2, its not absolutely necessary, but it should help you get higher FSB especially if you get the DFI with its high voltage settings. Heck, I've even considered WCing the southbridge, on my NF7-S it gets too hot to keep your finger on. As a bonus if you water cool all the heat producing ICs, you can get that heat out of you system case. In my case, I get the heat completely out of my bedroom (where I keep my two fastest computers) and dump it into the basement where the temps are always cool.
 
Well, as luck would have it, I have a Athlon XP 2400+ @ 2.0Ghz and an Athlon64 3200+ [email protected]. Well, as you can guess, the Athlon64 is faster in folding, on the order of 20-30% average. But it did cost me over 4X as much than the Athlon 2400+ (MB & Processor combined.) If I had instead purchased 4 Athlon XP 2400+ CPU's, I would be waaay up in daily points.

On the other hand, love my Athlon64, had it for 5 months now and it is very smooth and powerful. Other than video related items (GeForce4 Ti4200) that some newer games throw at it, I haven't been able to trip it up.
 
jaSihr said:
I had one of the early A7N8X, until it self-destructed. I really wasn't impressed. It gave me fits trying to get high FSB. At least it died for a good cause. If you get another nForce2 board, and you should, you should pick up a second stick of that ram. One gig is always nice and dual channel too! Koolance has some coolers that are suitable for the nForce2, its not absolutely necessary, but it should help you get higher FSB especially if you get the DFI with its high voltage settings. Heck, I've even considered WCing the southbridge, on my NF7-S it gets too hot to keep your finger on. As a bonus if you water cool all the heat producing ICs, you can get that heat out of you system case. In my case, I get the heat completely out of my bedroom (where I keep my two fastest computers) and dump it into the basement where the temps are always cool.
Click to expand...

The early nForce2 chipsets had a problem running 200FSB regardless of the motherboard. The problem was the chipset itself, which is why the 200FSB "option" disappeared from the spec sheets of the first revisions of the boards. I just happen to get lucky with the one I got.

I'd love to pick up another stick of the RAM I have but you can't find anymore unless someone has a used one for sale. I went looking a few months ago when I did a few computer purchases to see if I could find another stick of it but was unable to.

I have thought about adding NB cooling but will not spend the money on the current motherboard to do it. It's just not worth it being an early revision nForce2.

I wish I had a basement to vent the heat from my setup to. I had my room in the basement in my old house and it always stayed cool down there. That was one of the reasons I waited for a while before I got any type of watercooling setup. With the low ambient temperature and where the room was situated, temps stayed mostly the same year round. I was able to get temps with moderate air cooling that most people with good watercooling were getting. I wish I still lived there. Still have a nice cool room year round and still have cable internet. :(
 
OMG, you don't have cable! I feel your pain brother!!! I'd die w/o my cable. They can keep the TV, but I have to have my broadband through my cable. Don't wan't to mess with no PPPOE xDSL kludge. Thank you very much, I've helped a friend with the crap way too much to fall for that scam. Pay extra money just to hook up multiple computers to my broadband. Only thing I'll pay extra for is more speed. Hell, with emergence of BitTorrent/RSS broadcatching, I won't even need the TV part of cable very much longer. You hear that big entertainment companies; "Down with the Man, up with freedom!"
 
when you sell hardware... INCLUDE THAT IT WILL FOLD IN THE TERMS OF SALE. thank you very much. .. make it happen people, and your points will increase as you replace parts, and the other people might even borg one themselves a bit later (just make sure they understand team 33 is the true path : )
 
sharp said:
when you sell hardware... INCLUDE THAT IT WILL FOLD IN THE TERMS OF SALE. thank you very much. .. make it happen people, and your points will increase as you replace parts, and the other people might even borg one themselves a bit later (just make sure they understand team 33 is the true path : )
Click to expand...

I've tried to do stuff like this before and it has yet to go right. I'd love to do it with one guy but he always messes up his box and reformats. I think he ends up doing it about every couple of weeks or so and so it's impossible to get it installed on his box and keep it there. I know, cuz I've tried before.

I'd do it with another friend of mine and it was actually something I made him do when he borrowed my A7V133 and 1Ghz T-Bird. Unfortunately, he had the case stuffed in an enclosed space of the desk with no airflow being able to get to the system hardly and he didn't have good enough airflow inside the case to begin with. He had to run the CPU at 750mhz instead of 1 Ghz and still the damn thing liked to run a bit too hot. Besides, he manages to hose his Windoze install on a regular basis since he has no idea how to keep his box safe. Oh, he also managed to fry the T-Bird and I still don't know if the board still works or not. Haven't been able to get up to his house and stay sober enough to mess with it. So he's now stuck with his old PII 350@392. Teach him to not listen to me when I tell him to put the system somewhere else cuz it will get too hot.
 
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