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2MB vs. 4MB cache for folding, Does it matter?

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GigaHertzAddict

GigaHertzAddict

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When I went from a celerons, to pentium 4 to pentium D's the cache had very little effect in folding. Netburst cpu cache increases didn't do much.

With Core 2 duo, does the cache really matter? The know the core 2 duo's are very efficient, will the extra cache boost my production? This is for FOLDING ONLY. nothing else. I am thinking about getting either a 4300 or 6600... basically the cache is the issue.. You guys will help me decide. thanks.. I am going to order tonight... My Pentium D is just too slow..
 
E4300 would be cost effective. 2mb

I havea hard time seeing a diffrence in production from cache size.
I see a diffrence in production from sheer clock speed.

Just my $0.02
 
I just saw you have a 2MB cpu and a 4MB.. by any chance are they folding the same protiens? wanna do a quick comparison for us? Of course they would have to be clocked the same.
 
The cache size does make a difference with C2D's. Not a big difference but some of the more memory intense 2604/5's and the P147x's tend to get a boast. For example my E6300 is running at 3.3GHz, while ChasR had a E6600 running at 3.1GHz and he got 9:50-10 minutes a frame on the 2605's, while I got ~11 minutes a frame...and I was running a high FSB.

But on the less memory intense WU the extra cache doesn't help much.
 
The effect of the cache size depends mostly on the wu's ... some benefit a lot (p1495) and some it hardly matters.

Since my farm is at capacity in terms of # or rigs, i tend to go for the least limiting configs so i can maximize production from a fixed number of rigs.

But if you are still growing the farm, # of rigs added/$ spent is probably more important, so if the $ saved on lesser cache cpu's will make a difference to how many you build, then i would go with the smaller cache.

I am somewhat $ insensitive in terms of budget, but i don't like to spend $ on features that won't benefit production. Last year my farm crunched ~ 1500 1495's, so i got the value from the extra cache on my 930D vs 830D's and c2d 6600's vs 6400's.

SMP hasn't had much benefit from larger cache so far, but i wouldn't bet on that not changing.
 
The larger cache definitely makes a difference on SMP WUs which is what you are going to want to run on a folding only rig. Bang for the buck though probably goes to the E6300. For about $225 you can upgrade a Socket A rig to an ASRock 775Dual-VSTA/E6300, run it @ 300 MHz FSB and make well over 1000ppd. You can't make twice as many ppd for double the money going the E6600 route.
 
That'll work fine. It doesn't have VT so you won't be able to run FAH SMP under vmware/Linux, but that shouldn't matter on a dedicated folding box.

One day the Win SMP client will come out and lack of VT won't matter to folding at all.
 
Sleepy_Steve said:
Yeah, I am feeling the no SMP pain... with a pretty good OC [email protected] on my best rig, and i have to run it in windows because of the fact that its also my primary work PC. :cry:
Click to expand...
:confused: I hope you've found out by now that you can have 32bit XP (Windows) and run SMP_FAH in VMWare with 64bit Linux guest OS.

I'm getting ~3kPPD on two Windows machines that way with only 2.4 & 2.66GHz speeds.

Set it to low priority with WindowsTask Manager so it won't interfere with work apps.
 
I got my E4300 running for the past few days now and it's going great @ 3.2GHz.. Bus speed or cache aren't a huge factor. It's VERY CLOSE to 4MB chip. Close enough that the E4300 is a better deal especially since all I do is folding.
 
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