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[DBall]

I upgraded the power supply and CPU in an old system prior to bringing it back online. It is now applying 65 priority updates from Windows Update. I'll bet that once it's rebooted, it wants to apply more of them. Not sure if this system even has the SP2 update to Vista. Was last updated 10/23/2008 

I put in an Antec Earthwatts 500 watt power supply so I should be able to add a decent video card to the system. The old supply was 250 Watts. It's currently using Intel Integrated graphics. Any suggestions on what's the most stable video card for running BOINC?

I've wondered about upgrading it to Win7. What kind of luck have people had with 7 ?

[bob_bowen5]

I'm running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 on one of my quad cores with no problems...

[DBall]

I'm running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 on one of my quad cores with no problems...

I'm running Vista 64 on one of the quads (an HP a6554f, not the machine I'm rebuilding) and I've had several problems over the last few months.

Have you had any problems with Primegrid on the 64 bit system? I've had problems on Vista 64 bit where it seemed to run but stop making progress on the WU after a while. IIRC, WUs that typically run < 10 hours had run 40+ hours and seemed to be stuck when I killed them. Haven't run Primegrid on that machine since. During the same time period, Vista 32 bit machines didn't experience this.

I had problems with Rosetta a while back on Vista 64 but I think that was Norton Anti-virus getting a false positive. I saw several reports of other people having this problem with Rosetta and NAV so it was probably widespread.

A few weeks ago, I had to grant Aqua an exclusion on the Vista 64 machine because it confused Norton AVs behavior based detection. It's just a guess of mine but up until a few days ago, Aqua hadn't been able to get their multi-threaded app to properly lower the priority on the threads so I suspect Norton might have been objecting to a totally CPU bound job running for hours on all 4 cores at normal priority.

I'd be interested in hearing any problems you have with Win7 64 bit since I want to switch to that for my main development machine. The mainboard supports 8 GB of ram so a 64 bit OS would be nice.

[Txakura]

I just saw a friend's new toy, it had an i7 cpu and win7.  I ran the benchmark in the Boinc manager and was stunned at how much lower it benched per core than my quads on XP 64 Pro.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the best (win) OS for crunching is XP 64 Pro.

now, I understand that is all well and good but people need their boxes to run other things too... so... but if it were me and I was building a new killer box, I'd want the speed from my hardware that I paid for     

[mewbysea]

Any suggestions on what's the most stable video card for running BOINC?

I haven't heard of any stability problems with GPUs and BOINC, but I do keep getting messages from Einstein that my Nvidia card doesn't have enough memory -- they want 450 or better. 

[DBall]

I just saw a friend's new toy, it had an i7 cpu and win7.  I ran the benchmark in the Boinc manager and was stunned at how much lower it benched per core than my quads on XP 64 Pro.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the best (win) OS for crunching is XP 64 Pro.

now, I understand that is all well and good but people need their boxes to run other things too... so... but if it were me and I was building a new killer box, I'd want the speed from my hardware that I paid for     

Was the i7 running in hyperthreading mode. HT doubles the number of cores but, even on i7, they're much slower per core. Do you remember if it showed up as 4 cores or 8 cores? I've seen people recommend that you turn hyperthreading off for BOINC.

Win7 has some parameters that you need to tune to tell it you want performance instead of power savings.

Since this will be my main development system, it needs something newer like Win7.

[DBall]

Any suggestions on what's the most stable video card for running BOINC?

I haven't heard of any stability problems with GPUs and BOINC, but I do keep getting messages from Einstein that my Nvidia card doesn't have enough memory -- they want 450 or better. 

I'm glad you posted that. I've been thinking of getting one of the little GT 240's since they use less electricity (don't even need an extra power connector) but still have 96 shaders. There seems to be a choice between 512 MB of faster GDDR5 memory or 1 GB of DDR3 memory. I think you just made the decision for me. Thanks!!!

[mewbysea]

Anytime!  Its good to hear some chatter about the the upgrade bug.  I have to admit to sneaking some looks at the new i5 processors.... 

Maybe this summer  (dreaming big dreams  )