[Mad Matt]

Hey all fellow Mac crunchers,

First off: this new SETI altivec client is absolutely great work! My old G4/400 Gigabit went above 80 RAC with it, and I think it is still rising. 100 RAC should be possible soon. Thx to all involved in this!

My question: Is anyone using processor upgrades (no matter if sonnet, fastmac etc) for crunching? What are your experiences with crunchtimes, and also with power consumption (I am running 24/7), noise and heat?

Thx for your help!

[halimedia]

One of my boxes crunching SETI/BOINC is a Digital Audio G4 (early 2001), upgraded with a GigaDesigns 1.33 dual card. Everything works very reliably, and RAC is currently 530 and rising (using Alex and Rick's alpha-5 workers).

Power consumption is not an issue, as long as you don't have more than three HDDs installed and an ADC-connected display attached at the same time. With more HDDs, I'd recommend using a standard ATX PC power supply to power the disks. Works well, and lets you run up to six drives in a G4.

As far as upgrades are concerned, I can definitely recommend it! Gives you a nice speed boost in many applications. Heat-wise it's not much of an issue, since newer G4 processors used in upgrade cards have a much smaller thermal signature than the stock 7400/7410 variety. If I were you, I'd make sure that the upgrade has 7447 or 7457 G4s installed (7448 is fine, too, but I don't think there are any of those on the upgrade market yet). These run much cooler and consume much less power than 7445/7455 series.

But before you upgrade the CPU, upgrade RAM. I'd recommend 1 GB or more...

HTH,

Ron

[Mad Matt]

Thank you very much, Ron. That was very helpful and detailed information!

Unfortunately I realised that I am using a G4/400 AGP, not Gigabit... They are looking very similar. It is easy to determine by the name... LOL. Well. I know better now. Unfortunately my board revision will not allow a dual upgrade. But value of a used Gigabit is almost the same, so I will do a two-step upgrade.

Thx for the tip with the RAM, but since this old comp has been used for audio production, it already has about 1.4 Gig RAM

I would love to get a 7557, but even the best L3 won't give me the performance of a 2 ghz 7447, at least not for BOINC. So I might be tempted to wait for the 7448, but there is much guessing, if the upgrades will ever come...

Maybe I can keep the old horse as a server. It is my first mac, buyed brand new...strange feeling about a comp.

Many Thx and greetings to Switzerland!

Matthias

[alexkan]

Thought I'd put in my thoughts here, while we're talking about upgrade cards.

Not that SETI should be your primary reason for upgrading, but if it is, you might actually be better off sacrificing clock speed for L3 cache. I'm realizing now that it does in fact make quite a difference.

Put it this way: a primary factor in the performance of the SETI Altivec clients is whether or not your L2 and L3 cache total to more than 1 MB per CPU. If you have less, the difference between 256 and 512 KB is probably not that big, but going over the 1 MB threshold is huge, especially if it's L2. Since this is the difference between the 7447 and the 7457, I'd have to suggest a 7457 for SETI, even if it's a slower chip. This might be an even bigger deal if you consider that memory bandwidth on older G4s isn't that great.

To give you an example, the 1 MB L3 cache that my roommate's PowerBook has basically keeps the performance with an 800 MHz G4 pretty similar to my 1.67 GHz PB (which only has 512 KB of L2).

Hope this helps.

[Mad Matt]

Little update: with A LOT of luck, I found a real cheap Quicksilver 933....and it rocks!!!

I am really enthusiastic about the performance now, might even keep the old horse as a server...

With this speed, I can easily wait for 7448 upgrades to come, hopefully!

Thx for your help
Regards, Matt

PS: found this link at xlr8yourmac:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G4CARDS/p...457/index.html

The review does not seem to back up the performance of L3 upgrades in "real life" tests, surprising result though... but I guess there are a lot of different views on that.

[alexkan]

Originally Posted by Mad Matt

PS: found this link at xlr8yourmac:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G4CARDS/p...457/index.html

The review does not seem to back up the performance of L3 upgrades in "real life" tests, surprising result though... but I guess there are a lot of different views on that.

SETI is most definitely not representative of real-life performance. Not every application works on 1 MB chunks. It's the way SETI uses its data set that makes it so cache-hungry.

I'm sure there are a lot of benchmarks that don't agree with me. On the other hand, there are a lot of SETI benchmarks that do agree with me. I was just giving my very SETI-specific opinion.

[Gecko_r7]

Originally Posted by alexkan

SETI is most definitely not representative of real-life performance. Not every application works on 1 MB chunks. It's the way SETI uses its data set that makes it so cache-hungry.

I'm sure there are a lot of benchmarks that don't agree with me. On the other hand, there are a lot of SETI benchmarks that do agree with me. I was just giving my very SETI-specific opinion.

Hi Matt,

I have a G4 MDD single 1.25 167FSB w/ 4.44 bench & Alpha 5. Seti-only, 24/7. RAC between 315-330 depending on how many short WU at any given time. @ 5400secs per WU w/ short units removed. I'm troubleshooting a Giga dual 1.33 7455 2MB L3, 167FSB right now. Not quite the 10 minute upgrade as advertised. Locks me up tighter than a drum after booting. I suspect a firmware or Tiger 10.4.3 conflict as both are more recent than than the CPU packaging. We'll see what wonder-solution Giga comes up with If I can get this sorted out, it should work pretty well for my MDD G4. I'll let you know. Not many choices for my rig. BTW, I'm also running 1.5GB garden-variety Crucial PC2700 CAS 2.5.
Just my 2-cents, but my own research supports Alex's observations.
Given your box, if it were me, I'd go w/ dual 1.4 7457 chipset. Lot's of promises w/ 7448, but jury is still out if/when/who for mass availability for upgrades.
Good Luck!

Originally Posted by Mad Matt

Hey all fellow Mac crunchers,


My question: Is anyone using processor upgrades (no matter if sonnet, fastmac etc) for crunching? What are your experiences with crunchtimes, and also with power consumption (I am running 24/7), noise and heat?

Thx for your help!

I upgraded my Sawtooth single CPU 500 MHz Gigabit Ethernet PowerMac with PowerLogix Dual G4 Series 100 (2 x MPC 7457 CPUs).
http://www.powerlogix.com/products/G4_dual_cpu_100/

It was slightly simpler than installing a Hard Disk & I hate fiddling with my machine. The worst news is some increase in fan noise (it adds a fan) & once a month a problem waking from sleep, which isn't a problem during the winter as I leave my Mac running to crunch.

The good news:
I reached an average score of 562 on Einstein at Home (until I mistakenly unplugged my switch during Thanksgiving!).
It did over 27,000,000 keys/sec on RC5-72!
Day to day work (I mainly program, run spreadsheets & Mathlab) has made the nearly unbearable previous speed a thing of the past.

I did not like spending the money as I'm cheap-cheap, but I would do it again & strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to keep their old PowerMac humming!

[DrBoar]

F@H 24/7 for more than two years on a Sawtooth with GigaDesign 1.2. The heatsink is smaller than the heatsink on a 7600/200 so the fan on it is small and quite loud. I upgraded to a Pabst fan that is 5mm thicker and has a higher airflow and the heatsink is still really warm (in a room of 18-22 C). In my case both the 120mm case fan and the PSU fans can be heard so all blame is not on the upgrade.