More on the RAC Increase

I think I stopped slightly short of making my point last time, or possibly the post title slightly overstated my point.

Anyhoo my point was that despite a fairly severe pruning of my hardware, my RAC has not dropped much and certainly, seen through the longterm prism of Boincstats-RAC, is remarkably steady. (The surge then drop in raw RAC is mainly due to Milkyway giving me lots of credit in a hurry and then stopping rather than due to the hardware depletions.)


In part this is because I have kept the most efficient bits of the farm. A contibuting factor of course is that GPUGrid has improved it's credit for those who return their results early. Whatever my efficiency is hugely improved which is nice: As well as less noise heat & cost there are far fewer wires which looks much neater and must be much safer!

The Downsizing Continues - The RAC rises!

I'm doin' it, I'm doin' it!

Against all predictions I'm successfully downsizing the farm and I've got more plans to become yet more sustainable.

After the last downsize I slipped back a bit, tempted by the charms of Milkyway optimised for top end ATI cards, and acquired an HD4850 card. With up to 70K per day this bagged me a useful 1,000,000 credits before the supply of WUs all but ceased. Within the last 24 hrs I sold this to one of the TSBT young turks.

Also sold in the last week, again to another TSBT bod, complete with the rest of their system gubbins including cases, were two Quads one with a 9600GT and one with a non-boincing GPU (how legacy can you get?). This entailed carting two huge boxes weighing a total of 23kg down to my local Parcelforce depot. Leaving aside the damage to my hernial orifaces, the feng shui of the principal field of the farm has been significantly improved as did the climactic tolerability, my 'lecky bill, my carbon footprint &, with any hope, the noise, both in terms of fans & drives & the PSCAF (persisant spousal critical acoustic factor). The room feels almost empty and my KVM has only half of its 8 ports occuppied.

The reason one of the Quads was sold with a boinc-free GPU was that I discovered that my Phenom sytem supported up to 4 PCI-E cards so, from being a prime candidate for retirement, it got up graded to running two 260s and should, given the recent improvement in GPUGrid credit, be able to return 20K per day and become the Jewel in the Crown of the farm.

So that's the hoose with:
1x E6600 Hopefully soon to be sold as it brings little to the boinc party.
1xQ6600 with 1 x 260 [I think this is upgradable to take another GPU but it will need a better case first]
1xPhenom 9600+ with 2 x 260 [Imagine this with a Nehalem processor & mobo]
1x Q9450 with 1 x 260 [a better mobo allowing another GPU would be a great thing].
1xQ6600 with 1 x 280 [if only it could take another GPU]

Also I have two laptops and a work machine but they don't really matter.
So, despite some radical downsizing I still have a significant croft which, with some modest upgades, signposted above, should, even just running 4 machines, be enough to keep me in the top 200 for weeks to come, and in the top 500 for the foreseeable.

Boinc smarter not harder!