Well after a day of testing and resinstalling and writing, the results are in. Here is the much anticipated review I did of F@H to see if it had any negative affect to computer performance. I'll let the results speak for themselves. BTW: I did this in tweaktown fashion to make it a bit professional, and just in case a mod thinks its awesome enough to throw it up as an article I wouldnt have to do much cleaning up. Without further ado:
Introduction:
As many of you know I just recently started posting in the Tweaktown Forums, however Ive been using
the guides here for quite a while. One of the most recent additions to my hard drive was Folding@Home.
For those of you hiding under a rock in the Beer Garden, Folding@Home is a Distributed Computing
Program developed by Standford University to research folding proteins. In English, it's a program similar
to SETI@Home that hopefully will help cure disease. Couldn't be for a better cause. To find out more
go check out the website. http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
I had participated in SETI@Home in the past, but stopped because it really hurt system performance when
I was using the computer, and I was ALWAYS using the computer. So it was pretty impratical. When I
heard about F@H I though, ugh, more slowdown, but I decided to give it a try. Well what I found, is that
because it is set as an Idle process in Windows, it was not hurting my system performance at all. Even
when playing games such as Need for Speed: Underground and Max Payne 2, I saw no slowdown or FPS
drop whatsoever. So I figured its time whip out the benchmarks and see if F@H is as well written piece of
non-intrusive software.
Test Rig:
So what we have here is a fine piece of machinery I like the call Baal ;) No really, its just my computer.
Quick stats:
Aopen AK77 Pro o/c'd to 144 mhz FSB
1600+ XP o/c'd to 1500 mhz
256 mb Elixir PC2100 at CAS2
Audigy Gamer
10/100 NIC
WD ATA66 HD
Xtasy Ti4200 o/c'd to 310/580
I am using a nice stable overclock to simulate a real world situation where F@H would be running behind
games/apps etc. The benchmarks I'll be using are SiSoft Sandra 2k4 to check is F@H idle CPU usage
affects a synthetic benchmark. 3dMark2001SE to see if F@H running behind DX8 games would affect
performance. And Aquamark3 to simulate a real world DX9 game, and because I think the scenes are
pretty cool. ;)
All Benchmarks were run after a clean install of XP Pro, with minimal background services, and no apps
on startup besides RivaTuner to O/C the video card. Each benchmark was run 3 times and then an average
was taken. The computer was restarted after each benchmark ran 3 times. Now, on to some numbers.
The Test:
Well I dont have Excel on my computer at the moment, so you won't get any bar graphs, but what you will
get are some pretty suprising results. First lets take a look at Sandra 2k4.
CPU Arthmetic Benchmark:
Control Test: 5682 Mips / 2350 Flops
F@H in BG: 5681 Mips / 2350 Flops
CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
Control Test: 13687 Int / 14012 Float
F@H in BG: 13688 Int / 14007 Float
Memory Bandwith Benchmark:
Control Test: 2093 Int / 1935 Float
F@H in BG: 2074 Int / 1938 Float
Cache & Memory Benchmark:
Control was exact same as F@H in BG.
I was really suprised with this. I figured if any performance degredation were to show up, it would have been in
the stressful Sandra Benchmarks. Boy was I wrong. There was no performance difference whatsoever.
AquaMark3:
Control Test: 19173
F@H in BG: 19220
Again, WOW! Actually had a slight performance boost with F@H in the Background. No scores on the control group
went over the lowest score attained while running F@H.
3dMark2001Se
Control Test: 9597
F@H in BG: 9625
And once again, a really cool result, with F@H beating out the control test. Its starting to form a pattern. Onto the
rambling conclusion.
Conclusion:
One Word. Hotness.
What I've discovered is having F@H running in your background has absolutely no disadvantages to your overall
system performace at all. I also tried it out with 2 real world games, Max Payne 2 and Need for Speed Underground.
Using Fraps 2.0 I found no difference in framrate while F@H was running in the BG. So why not run F@H? You're not
hurting you're system performace, and you're helping to cure disease.
Get over to http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/ and download the client and get cranking out those W/U's
And dont forget to join TweakTown's Team: ID# 33272 so you can get your name in lights in our stats:
Thanks to Minibubba for starting the TT F@H group and having his sig get me inetersted in F@H.
And thanks to Tweaktown for being the coolest freakin Computer Enthusiasts to date, period.
Peace.
-Fatguy3
Introduction:
As many of you know I just recently started posting in the Tweaktown Forums, however Ive been using
the guides here for quite a while. One of the most recent additions to my hard drive was Folding@Home.
For those of you hiding under a rock in the Beer Garden, Folding@Home is a Distributed Computing
Program developed by Standford University to research folding proteins. In English, it's a program similar
to SETI@Home that hopefully will help cure disease. Couldn't be for a better cause. To find out more
go check out the website. http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
I had participated in SETI@Home in the past, but stopped because it really hurt system performance when
I was using the computer, and I was ALWAYS using the computer. So it was pretty impratical. When I
heard about F@H I though, ugh, more slowdown, but I decided to give it a try. Well what I found, is that
because it is set as an Idle process in Windows, it was not hurting my system performance at all. Even
when playing games such as Need for Speed: Underground and Max Payne 2, I saw no slowdown or FPS
drop whatsoever. So I figured its time whip out the benchmarks and see if F@H is as well written piece of
non-intrusive software.
Test Rig:
So what we have here is a fine piece of machinery I like the call Baal ;) No really, its just my computer.
Quick stats:
Aopen AK77 Pro o/c'd to 144 mhz FSB
1600+ XP o/c'd to 1500 mhz
256 mb Elixir PC2100 at CAS2
Audigy Gamer
10/100 NIC
WD ATA66 HD
Xtasy Ti4200 o/c'd to 310/580
I am using a nice stable overclock to simulate a real world situation where F@H would be running behind
games/apps etc. The benchmarks I'll be using are SiSoft Sandra 2k4 to check is F@H idle CPU usage
affects a synthetic benchmark. 3dMark2001SE to see if F@H running behind DX8 games would affect
performance. And Aquamark3 to simulate a real world DX9 game, and because I think the scenes are
pretty cool. ;)
All Benchmarks were run after a clean install of XP Pro, with minimal background services, and no apps
on startup besides RivaTuner to O/C the video card. Each benchmark was run 3 times and then an average
was taken. The computer was restarted after each benchmark ran 3 times. Now, on to some numbers.
The Test:
Well I dont have Excel on my computer at the moment, so you won't get any bar graphs, but what you will
get are some pretty suprising results. First lets take a look at Sandra 2k4.
CPU Arthmetic Benchmark:
Control Test: 5682 Mips / 2350 Flops
F@H in BG: 5681 Mips / 2350 Flops
CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
Control Test: 13687 Int / 14012 Float
F@H in BG: 13688 Int / 14007 Float
Memory Bandwith Benchmark:
Control Test: 2093 Int / 1935 Float
F@H in BG: 2074 Int / 1938 Float
Cache & Memory Benchmark:
Control was exact same as F@H in BG.
I was really suprised with this. I figured if any performance degredation were to show up, it would have been in
the stressful Sandra Benchmarks. Boy was I wrong. There was no performance difference whatsoever.
AquaMark3:
Control Test: 19173
F@H in BG: 19220
Again, WOW! Actually had a slight performance boost with F@H in the Background. No scores on the control group
went over the lowest score attained while running F@H.
3dMark2001Se
Control Test: 9597
F@H in BG: 9625
And once again, a really cool result, with F@H beating out the control test. Its starting to form a pattern. Onto the
rambling conclusion.
Conclusion:
One Word. Hotness.
What I've discovered is having F@H running in your background has absolutely no disadvantages to your overall
system performace at all. I also tried it out with 2 real world games, Max Payne 2 and Need for Speed Underground.
Using Fraps 2.0 I found no difference in framrate while F@H was running in the BG. So why not run F@H? You're not
hurting you're system performace, and you're helping to cure disease.
Get over to http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/ and download the client and get cranking out those W/U's
And dont forget to join TweakTown's Team: ID# 33272 so you can get your name in lights in our stats:
Thanks to Minibubba for starting the TT F@H group and having his sig get me inetersted in F@H.
And thanks to Tweaktown for being the coolest freakin Computer Enthusiasts to date, period.
Peace.
-Fatguy3
Comment