Old school SMP on the cheap.

A friend challenged me to a build off. Were gonna take a hundred bucks apeice and make SETI crunchers. The winner will be the one who can do the most work in two months of SETI@home. The hundred dollars is for a mobo and CPU/CPUs. We both have stashes of ram and old hdds so those wont be factored into the cost. I'm planning on building an older SMP system, possibly socket 370, to crush any single he can acquire. My questions are, should I stick to the 370 or are old AMD SMP systems a lot cheaper? Also, for the 370, is there a noticable long-run performance difference between the PIIIs and Celerys with slightly higher clocks? Thanks in advance for advice, flames, yelling, noobish comments, ect.

Have you checked ebay? You might be able to find some lv xeons for 50 bucks adna motherboard for 50 bucks.If you can find Socket 603 Xeon's I ahve a board that I'll sell to you cheap(to fit your budget).

The only cellys that will work in SMP are mendocinos, 300A-500 Mhz. Overclockable to 550-600 if you're lucky.

I think the problem is here, that AMD dually motherboards usually cost too much, for you to be able to get an AMD dually going for under 100 and intel CPUs cost too much for you to get an intel dually going for under 100.

I also think a socket 370 dually is "past it" in terms of being faster than any single CPU still. The max speed you'll get out of it is with 2 PIII-S 1.4G chips running on a 150fsb for 1575 apiece, 3150 Mhz total. Now efficiency will tell here against P4 class in a lot of apps, but I had the impression that Seti needed pure Mhz. You'll have a hard time finding those CPUs for less than $80 a a piece though

If you could find a socket A dual mobo for only $40, then you might just be able to find two duron 1800s that will run at 2Ghz with the FSB at 150 for $30 each

So, as far as I know, I figure a single CPU solution could probably just beat that config at SETI. A lot of celerons Ds are hitting 4Ghz these days...

I think it's a challenge in itself to put together an SMP combo for under $100, never mind require that it could beat a single.

Edit: From pricewatch prices, fastest, or really only, dually that I can config for under $100, is dual PIII 933s.

Shelnutt, LV xeons are pretty hard to come by, not to mention that they tend to cost more than a hundred bucks for just the processors. RoadWarrior, thanks for the info, I'll see what else I can drag up. Neither of us have bought anything yet, so maybe I can get him to come up on the price.

Sounds like a very cool idea for a competition, good luck to ya! I will keep an eye out for anything that will fit the bill

my friend picked up a matched set of 4 PII Xeons off of ebay for $17 for another one of his ghetto builds... so i'm just gonna tell you to watch ebay


edit: here's a nice set of 4x 450mhz PII Xeons: http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-of-4-Intel-...ryZ56107QQssPageNameZWD1VQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

quat slot II xeon motherboard: http://cgi.ebay.com/Compaq-Proliant...ryZ71509QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

keep checking ebay I got 700mhz Xeons x2, board, memory (1GB SDRAM) for 30$

If you're going the SMP route, I'd try to squeeze an Athlon MP board out for cheap, then pick up a pair of old single XPs or Durons and do the MP mod on them. Far more power than a P3 platform, and AMP platforms are getting to the "old" stage where they get cheap. Even if its a Tyan that you can't FSB overclock, you can still mod the multis.

Edit: I said "single core XPs" as if there were dual core XPs. I meant single CPU XPs, so you could mod them for dual operation.

mateo said:

Even if its a Tyan that you can't FSB overclock, you can still mod the multis.

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CPUFSB works with Tyan dual boards that have no BIOS fsb overclocking.

I use it for S2460 Tiger MP and run SMP mod T-Bred 1700+'s @ 11.0 X 150 = 1650MHz. Nice cheap setup if you can find the board. Classifieds have 1700+'s for $35. shipped.

That's good to know hallen.

If you don't want to mess with unlocking though and are only going to run the FSB straight up to 150. Then Tbred As would do fine, and due to thier bad rep, should be even cheaper. I think the rep is a bit undeserved, they do clock better than pallys, just not as spectacularly as the Bs. My tbredA 1700 does 1850 easily with only another 0.1V over stock.

That's good to know hallen.

If you don't want to mess with unlocking though and are only going to run the FSB straight up to 150. Then Tbred As would do fine, and due to thier bad rep, should be even cheaper. I think the rep is a bit undeserved, they do clock better than pallys, just not as spectacularly as the Bs. My tbredA 1700 does 1850 easily with only another 0.1V over stock.

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Although, if you do get a board with multiplier adjustments, most of the T-Bred B's are unlocked. My T-Bred B will do 2GHz with no voltage bump.

Sorry i haven't replied to this post in a while. My main rig is down and I scratched this thing together out of spare parts. Anyway, thanks for all of the advice. The guy who wants to do the competition said he'll go to 150 if the winner gets to keep both rigs. I laughed at him. Theres no way in hell I'm risking 150 bucks over computers. So I guess the price is still a hundred bucks. Theres a local guy selling a couple xps for $50, but I dont know what speed they are and have no mobo to test them in.

I dont know how this translates into seti, but i have a tualatin celeron that will match the output of celeron d's at 2x the clock speed when crunching big gromacs with FAH.

a friend is giving me a dual athalon 2100 mp system tomorrow with a gig of ram (not sure on the mobo yet).... $100 it's yours lol

just to give you the sweet taste of victory. lol

well.....maybe i wouldn't sell it for a hundred bucks..... but i'd let ya use it for shipping costs and you could say it costed ya a hundred bucks
heheh

hey here's dual xeons socket 603....

http://cgi.ebay.com/Matched-Pair-In...792681642QQcategoryZ51055QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


I'll sell you my ECC REG memory required mobo for 30 bucks to fit your budget....

Shelnutt2 said:

hey here's dual xeons socket 603....

http://cgi.ebay.com/Matched-Pair-In...792681642QQcategoryZ51055QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


I'll sell you my ECC REG memory required mobo for 30 bucks to fit your budget....

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Those are Fosters, aka SMP Willies...good try, but IMHO not worth it. Generally, you should try to avoid those anyway. That price doesn't leave much for a mobo, and you could get a pair of K7s for less that would perform better anyway.

If you manage to find some Prestonia LVs or 1.8 GHz/512k L2s around, those would be sweet, but I think they'd be too expensive for this project.

mateo said:

Those are Fosters, aka SMP Willies...good try, but IMHO not worth it. Generally, you should try to avoid those anyway. That price doesn't leave much for a mobo, and you could get a pair of K7s for less that would perform better anyway.

If you manage to find some Prestonia LVs or 1.8 GHz/512k L2s around, those would be sweet, but I think they'd be too expensive for this project.

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reason for possibly going with willies was that I have a socket 603 mobo that I was trying to get read of buy selling it to Sephis cheap to fit his budget if he could find cheap enough willies.

Shelnutt2 said:

reason for possibly going with willies was that I have a socket 603 mobo that I was trying to get read of buy selling it to Sephis cheap to fit his budget if he could find cheap enough willies.

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Ah, makes sense now. I think SETI is more P4-oriented anyway; I'm not sure. That sort of unselfishness is why I love this forums

mateo said:

Ah, makes sense now. I think SETI is more P4-oriented anyway; I'm not sure. That sort of unselfishness is why I love this forums

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I thought willies were p4 acritecture? or is that just prestones and up?

Shelnutt2 said:

I thought willies were p4 acritecture? or is that just prestones and up?

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They are, its just that with .18 micron and the small cache, they were crappy. Fosters also had HT, but it was buggy and actually hurt performance in some instances. My point in the P4 comment was that despite all of this, the chips look better than normal because SETI might be P4-oriented.