Upgrading CPU Question ?

[Johnmark]

Gday all,
I'm pulling an E8400 out of my lounge cruncher and going to replace it with a Q9650.

Do I need to do anything on the WCG side because the processor is changing but the machine name is the same? Will WCG pick up the fact the CPU has changed?

And I'm going to update BOINC client. Can I just install over the old, or is it better to uninstall then reinstall?

TIA
Matt

[hedge]

You should be fine just putting the new cpu in and then make sure that in the preferences for BOINC you set the maximum number of cpus to 4. Also, I don't think there are any problems just installing over the older client.

[Johnmark]

I don't see any settings in BOINC Client or Manager for CPU's? Manager has a 0-100% setting for CPU usage, is that what you are referring to or what am I missing.
It seems that the BOINC client nor manager shows information about the CPU. It's just the Stats client that seem to show CPU information?
Don't know if the Q9650 will still show up as an E8400 or it will some how update itself?
As long as it crunches properly I guess it really doesn't matter?

[shoota]

When I upgraded to a quad I think I just re ran the CPU benchmark and updated wcg. Don't remember doing anything more than that

[D_A]

BOINC will discover the new processor and extra cores on it's own and sort itself out.

[Johnmark]

Oky Doky, the subject matters experts have issued expressed their opinions which point to a go with the new (to me) CPU.
The Q9650 should be the last CPU this LGA 775 ROG board will see.

Thanks Peeps.

[D_A]

I take it you have confirmed that the regs can handle the draw of that quad? Some of the early 775 boards SAID they were quad compatible ... but they couldn't keep up with the power demands.

[Johnmark]

I take it you have confirmed that the regs can handle the draw of that quad? Some of the early 775 boards SAID they were quad compatible ... but they couldn't keep up with the power demands.

No I didn't look into the regs.

I figured its a Asus ROG board so it better be able to handle the load

Anyway's it is installed and crunching now. WCG isn't updating the machine with new work yet, maybe it is confused? So she's crunching the three WU's that were still in the BOINC client before I put the new CPU in.

Ran a BOINC benchmark and was surprised to see the E8400 OCed 32% is beating (by a hair) the Q9650 OCed at 15%.

[shoota]

the ROG will be just fine. there's no way an e8400 should be beating a q9650, oc'ed or not

[D_A]

Your benchmarks can vary depending on what's running in the background. A lot.

[BlindFreddie]

* In earlier BOINC clients, the setting for the number of CPUs to use was expressed as the actual number (2,4, etc). I forget whether it had an "all" option. Newer clients take the value as %, which is guaranteed to cover your situation automatically. That's an improvement I think.

* The BOINC benchmark results are for 1 CPU only. The E8400 and the Q9650 should get identical scores when you scale them to account for the difference in your clock-speeds. They are both Penryn CPUs.
I have used perfmonitor.exe (from http://www.cpuid.com/ ) to observe cache success rate/memory access rate during the benchmarks on both Yorkfield quads (3MB cache/core) and Athlon-64 X2 (512kb/core), and the benchmarks access memory very little if at all, on either CPU type. This means that there will be no contention for memory access among the multiple cores, so your quad and duo scores should be identical, clock-for-clock.

[shoota]

How about cache accessing during crunching?

[Johnmark]

Interesting enough Free_DC which shows a given ID # indicates the processor as being upgraded, but not BOINc although it may be just a matter of time.

[Johnmark]

Boinc stats just updated my stats page and it now shows the Q9650 as replacing the E8400