[reader50]

Milestones and Ranks finished over an hour early tonight. As for how that managed to happen ... but first, some background.

Scott was upgrading his Sawtooth 500 to a PowerLogix 1.4 GHz card, and had given me a standing offer of $30 for the old 500 card. A decent price for a fair upgrade on my Sawtooth 350. Last week I mailed him $100 ... $30 for the card, and a $70 donation to teamstats, to help with the servers Scott has maintained for so long.

Today, the box arrived from Scott. Opening it produced a gift-wrapped (?) GigaDesigns box -- strange, since he'd ordered a PowerLogix. Opening the GigaDesigns box revealed he'd reused it to safely ship the G4 500 ... er, wait. Instead of the OEM G4 500 card, the box contains a GigaDesigns 1.2 in unbroken static bag.

It seems that Scott plus certain conspirators on our team (you know who you are), decided to pitch in and send a surprise my way. I'd been saving for a new dual G6 in January-March of next year, and had not expected a huge speed boost before then.

So tonight went something like this:

1. Reach Scott on IM, he refuses extra money.
2. Boot into 9, update to latest firmware.
3. Reboot, everything ok, all RAM still shows up. Shut down.
4. Switch CPU cards.
5. Boot up, hang on boot. Hang on option boot too.
6. Option-OpenApple-P-R
7. Boot into 9. Things seem faster, ASP shows 1200 MHz.
8. Boot into X. Boot is over almost before the OSX dialog box appears.
9. Open 13 Terminal windows, start top and 12 PHP scripts. This is Wednesday night after all, 5 Ranks scripts + 6 project scripts + Milestones script. There was no text-pasting lag as normally happens when I push the system past a 7.0 load.
10. All scripts finish in a bit over an hour, instead of near midnight. This is despite iTunes running, and iCab running to post Milestones.
11. Ok, this is seriously fast.

The suspicious box:


Here is the cause of the faster scripts:


And the results:


So it appears that I now owe the team a bunch more stats and service upgrades. This is what happens when you jump ship from a dead MacAddict team and help out the MacNN team where all the nice people you know hang out.

Ok guys and gals, expect the good stuff to keep coming. It would have anyway of course, after I finish some urgent work in the real world. In the meantime, the Ranks are likely to show up a bit earlier each night from now on.

Oh, and one more thing. Thank you.

There are many fine teams on the internet. We do not need to search for the one with the best members.

[Scotttheking]

Now, my shameless post.
Thanks to all who responded to my PMs, and to the ars and free-dc folks who also helped out.
If I didn't contact you, and you are interested in pitching in, fire off a PM to me. Reader50 thinks his upgrade is done

By the way, I caught this little tidbit via AIM about 10 mins ago

Reader50 (12:32:10 AM): Now time to check a few game demos. Back in a bit.

Someone's going to be sleepy at work tomorrow (I don't count, I always am sleepy at work).

[reader50]

The upgrade had best be done, I owe too much as it is.

Oh, btw ... Scott's quote came from his IM window, where he uses aliases of members' screen names. Please do not contact "Reader50" on AIM, that name belongs to some dude who grabbed the name ahead of me. I've never even spoken with him.

[mikkyo]

Enjoy!
A well deserved reward for sure!


Plus you will need all that extra power to get the Boinc stats working

[OneMacGuy]

No, it is us who should thank you! Our meager contributions toward your small present should probably amount to around a nickel and hour for the time you have put in to help our team have the best stats around!

Thanx again!

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by OneMacGuy:
No, it is us who should thank you! Our meager contributions toward your small present should probably amount to around a nickel and hour for the time you have put in to help our team have the best stats around!

Thanx again!

What OneMacGuy said..... You deserve that and more.

[Lateralus]

Congratulations. And yes, if anybody deserves it, you do.

[Capt Shane]

I was thinking about getting an upgrade card for my G4 450 AGP is it worth the extra dough?

[Lateralus]

Yes.

[[APi]TheMan]

Whoa, I guess I missed the congrats party, but you're welcome, reader50! You do an awesome job.

[OneMacGuy]

Originally posted by reader50:
The upgrade had best be done, I owe too much as it is.

Oh, btw ... Scott's quote came from his IM window, where he uses aliases of members' screen names. Please do not contact "Reader50" on AIM, that name belongs to some dude who grabbed the name ahead of me. I've never even spoken with him.

So tell us, how is the upgrade? Does it help with gaming? My Dual 533 is not up to the new games like Unreal Tournament 2004, maybe with an upgrade like yours?

[reader50]

The upgrade is a G4 1.0 GHz rated to run at 1.2 GHz by GigaDesigns. I've been playing with the UT2004 Demo during spare time, and it plays fine. However, when room temp is above 90º, it was causing UT2004 Demo to quit, and Folding was exiting early on errors.

I've since backed it down to 1.1 GHz where it is more stable during high ambient temps. It may end up being clocked at 1.2 during the winter and 1.0 during late summer, 1.1 the rest of the time.

Folding does fine except when I'm gone during the day and ambient temps inside get around 100º. It made no difference for the original Unreal Tournament in 9, the graphics upgrade to an 8500 made the big impact there. UTX beta became playable with the GigaDesigns upgrade, but that beta is still weird with rendering glitches and odd sound effects.

UT2003 Demo and UT2004 Demo run nicely now, they were unplayable before unless you stared at a blank wall, or played human players only with minimal settings.

Based on CPU clock speed alone, it should be about 3.3x as fast as my G4 350. iTunes uses half the CPU it used to, while PHP scripts are 5x faster. Maybe iTunes increases the playback quality when it has more CPU available. As for the scripts, I guess they mostly execute from the L2 cache. DVD Player uses 1/3 the CPU it used to.

MySQL is speeded up somewhat but remains disk limited. Booting in X got a much bigger speedup than booting in 9.

This upgrade is going to cost me some money for games, they were not worth buying before. Since Apple is delaying the next CPU upgrades (Power5 derivative?) until early next year, some of the money can go to Epic in the meantime.

If you plan a CPU upgrade to your dual 533 for games, plan on a graphics upgrade too. Both are bottlenecks. If I'd not gotten the Radeon 8500 earlier, I'm sure UT2004 Demo would be pretty sad, even with a CPU at 1.2 GHz.