Best way to set up folding on Mom's computer

[sYnAnjin]

I am going to get my mom a quad core combo with 2 gb of ram, we will be recycling her XP home.

Now I won't be doing SMP, mom can't and shouldn't be asked to handle that.

I will set it up as a service and it must fold in the background (yes she knows it is there but doesn't want to be able to tell it is there).

So can I set two or three regular units folding on an individual core and leave core #1 open/alone for mom's use?

If I can't do that, and I load two regular units and set config to use 100%, will that effectively use 50% on each core but keep the WU going at a 100% pace?

Or is it better to just load two and set config to use like 80% and how will that run?

Don't want to use more than two to three units folding as I will leave big units set to "on" and those can consume a lot of ram. Two or three ok for mom.

Thanks

[sneakers55]

I am going to get my mom a quad core combo with 2 gb of ram, we will be recycling her XP home.

Don't think XP Home will run quad core.

So can I set two or three regular units folding on an individual core and leave core #1 open/alone for mom's use?

My experience was that other apps flowed a lot more smoothly with the CPU maximum set to 95% but YMMV.

Don't want to use more than two to three units folding as I will leave big units set to "on" and those can consume a lot of ram. Two or three ok for mom.

You could cut back the amount of RAM F@H reports in the advanced options. I can't see most moms needing more than a gigabyte (about the most I use is 1.1 GB and I load a lot of stuff).

[uncle fuzzy]

Don't think XP Home will run quad core.

Yes, it will. I'm doing it right now.

Right now I'm running my mother's computer with 2 v6.0 cpu clients set up as services on a single core processor, both clients set to 100% (I only get over there with my wireless broadband card once a week). She can still watch a DVD with no lag. Her new C2D will be going together this week, but I still intend to run 2, or more, clients per core since I'll still only get there once a week.

Unless your mother is editing video, I don't see why you couldn't run 4 clients. They WILL give way to any programs. With my mother's current, and future, machine, temperature will be the only limiting factor in how much folding it does.

[sYnAnjin]

No, no video editing, but she plays a lot of those flash over the net type games that can't count on any gpu or sound card so use the heck out of the cpu.

So I know like 1487 or 9 used tons of ram and just two on a dual core with 2 gbs was noticable. I would hate to have eight of those going on a quad with just 2 gb. I don't know much about current untis available but with big units selected they can be quite large. I think I will stick with 2 units at 95%.

So my question remains does 2 units at lets say 100% use all four cores at 50% or 2 at 100% or something else? And if it does use all four at 50% and core one is at 80% usage does that limit the other cores to 20% out put or do they pick up the slack?

Glad to hear about XP home, I knew my XP pro had no problems with 4 cores, I was almost ready to take this back to the store.

8) np

[uncle fuzzy]

The clients will share cpu cores. Two clients at 100% will draw around 50% on all 4 cores. The actual usage of each core will be semirandom, depending on the WUs, but they will average 50% on each. I doubt if you'd see something as high as 80% or low as 20%. You should see between 45% and 55% times 4.

[bruce]

On a Quad, I recommend 3 clients each set for 100% CPU. They will use 75% of the total, always leaving one core free for whatever else she decides to do. The only scenario I'd recommend reducing the CPU setting below 100% is if you run 4 clients and feel that FAH does not release enough resources to foreground applications or the machine is laptop which tends to overheat.

Like uncle fuzzy says, the three clients will distribute their load randomly across four CPUs, and your mom's game will push them aside if anything she does takes up more than one CPU's worth of resources.

Does she have a broadband internet connection?

[sYnAnjin]

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the answer. I just got it set up and for now with two units set at 100%.

FAH seems very aware of its surroundings, when two units are running all 4 cores fold at around 50%, with Super Pi running on core 0 then the other three pick up to 75% and with an instance of super pi on core 0 and 1 then all 4 unit are at 100%. So that answered my question, no loss of folding even with two double threaded aps running at 100% on core 1 and 2.

After the AS5 sets and temps go down 4 or 5 C then I will possibly set 3 units to folding. Sitting at 60C with two folding and 68C with all four cores at 100%.

Thanks everyone for the input.

And yes even my copy of XP home, bought the first week of release, when updated saw all 4 cores.

[7im]

Depending on how often you visit Mom, use the released v5 client, not the beta 6 client. No need to update every 2 months as betas expire. Run as service, and 3 clients, as mentioned above. If memory usage is a concern, set BigWUs on in only 2 of the 3 clients.

Also, there is a list of supported processors by MS Operating System, at the bottom of the Known Bugs List sticky post. And remember, the list is for the number of processor sockets, not cores. Microsoft's official word about multiple processors across all its products is that they are licensed by physical processor socket, not by the number of cores on each processor. That means the number of cores is unlimited, just the processor count is limited.

XP Home only supports 1 socket, XP Pro supports 2 sockets. But when you have Quads, who cares?