benchmark update

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I took a bit of a detour this past couple of weeks. I'm doing a big round up of all the latest Catalyst driver releases for ATI cards on all the 3D benchmarks. There are some significantly surprising results! I'm less than halfway through as the testing is quite rigourous, and the results will be put up in the members section of BenchTecUK forums. Not a member? Join the team at HWbot, put up 3 scoring results (which isn't that hard) and start posting on the forum.

I've actually been quite generous to myself recently, and picked up some more equipment:

ATi 2400 Pro
nVidia 7800GS
5 Socket A processors, from Duron 700 to Athlon 1400
Socket A motherboard and cooler w/VGA port (1.5V and 3.3V)
Various Socket 478 processors from ebay

I took apart my old P4 mobo from its case so I could mess around with it. I took the cooler off, and the P4 proc came off with it! Looks like they'd used 3g of thermal material to seat the proc, and it'd set. I had to douse the area with TIM to help dissolve the thermal material, then use two screwdrivers to seperate the proc from the cooler. But I reseated it the way I wanted, hopefully I can push that beyond 3.6Ghz now.

I bought the Socket A procs and gfx cards from the BenchTec forums. I didn't have a socket A motherboard, but the procs were cheap, so I picked up a mobo/proc/cooler combo off ebay for under 20 notes. Got the mobo combo in the mail yesterday, only to find they'd used EVEN MORE thermal material on the proc... it hadn't even set properly. So I cleaned that up, and I'll test it soon after my Catalyst round up.

As far is BOINC is concerned, I'm atm only running 2 ATI cards on Milkyway - it'll be four when I've finished the Catalyst roundup. Aqua isn't giving out as much work, or credit, as before - but I got enough WUs to push me over 1m this week. GPUGrid climbed over 750k and is onto 1m fairly soon. SETI is being very awkward, and is having trouble getting to 250k. I may swap my nVidia card on GPUGrid over to Seti when GPUGrid reaches 1m - maybe get SETI to 1m. We'll see what happens.

At the minute, Dutchie is laying without power supply or graphics cards. I'll sort that soon.

On a bright note, I'm being commissioned to design a couple of websites. No doubt you can guess where that cash is going.

Also as a side project, as I've been learning CUDA and dabbling in OpenMP, I've been thinking of writing a benchmark program. The guys at BenchTec are being supportive - it probably wont be used at hwbot, but might use it in some form of competition at BenchTec. I'll post it here too :)

Take care, I'm back to benching.