Some questions about a laptop

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qbit
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Message 1540798 - Posted: 13 Jul 2014, 10:29:32 UTC

I could get a laptop for a really good price and I'm considering to buy it.

The laptop has a Pentium N3520 quad core CPU with integrated graphics. I can't find this CPU here on Seti but from what I found on other sites I suppose it should be about the same crunching speed (or even a bit faster) then my current desktop (Intel E5300) but ofc with much less power consumption (TDP is only 7.5 watts).

I never had an laptop before so I'm not really sure, do you guys think I could run this 24/7 without any cooling?

And what do you think will the RAC be? Around 1k?

Also I wonder if I could use the integrated graphics for crunching also.

And my last question: This laptop has Linux installed. I could install W7 Home Premium 32bit also, so I wonder if there is any difference in crunching speed between Linux and Windows? (ofc I would use optimised apps).
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Message 1541082 - Posted: 13 Jul 2014, 18:00:51 UTC - in response to Message 1540798.  

Anytime you use a laptop for crunching you are taking a chance. You are running up the chip to high temperatures for long periods of time. Others will know if you can used the integrated GPU for crunching or not. You will probably need a cooling pad for your laptop if you do decide to use it for seti. Given the choice between a laptop and a desktop for crunching, you are probably better off with a desktop. Just my 2 cents.
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Message 1541125 - Posted: 13 Jul 2014, 20:22:10 UTC

I have a Bay Trail-D machine I am running now. The PPW seems very good for it. It runs cool enough that it stays at its "burst" clock rate all the time. I did add a fan as the MB came fanless, but it a silent 80mm one I just plopped over the heatsink until I get a case for it.

Notebooks will vary. Mine have their air intake on the bottom. So setting them on something to raise the notebook about an inch to allow for better air intake seems to be sufficient for me. For one I used Lego to make supports for each for the 4 feet. The other I currently have sitting on my desk in a way that the intake hangs off the desk.
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Message 1541236 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 0:46:21 UTC
Last modified: 14 Jul 2014, 0:51:06 UTC

I have run a few Laptops with Seti but there has been prob's with cooling and my last 1 lasted only a couple of months before the H/D gave out . Most lappy's have 3.5 h/d and they are just not meant to run 24/7 I have lost external 3.5 drives and in Lappy's

I would not recommend using a Lappy for Seti any more than a few hrs a day if you wish it to last the Lappy will be ok but not the H/D

I fixed 1 the other day first time I have ever smelt a H/D have the smell of burning and it was not used for Seti but was on pretty much 24/7 at least that's what I was told buy the owner

I believe some can do work with the integrated graphic chip but has to be very latest but others can confirm that . I am trying a new Lappy now but I get the blue screen of death after a while I think it's over heating and I only had it going for 36hrs before it started doing it and has done it twice so I have turnd it off till I get in the mood to check out the cooling fan .

So you have a few examples to think about .. be it at you own risk to use a Lappy

I do know a user that uses his Lappy and has had no trouble so ......

one last thing my old Pentium that died Rac was 250 the new one is core 2 2.1gig was doing approx. 10 units per day with both cores so you mite get 1k as a Rac is that worth risking it ???
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Message 1541444 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 8:36:30 UTC - in response to Message 1540798.  
Last modified: 14 Jul 2014, 8:37:22 UTC

Looking at some non seti benchmarks it seems to rate similar to an E5500, so it might RAC out slightly at slightly higher than your desktop?

The low TDP hopefully makes cooling less of an issue, as long as the laptop has cooling that will handle it. Obviously getting rid of 7w of power is a lot easier than moving ~50w. So it might be a good candidate for low power cruncher.

Linux vs Windows? No big difference. The optimised apps are a bit easier to install on Windows, but once you have it running, not much difference.

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Message 1541471 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 10:21:09 UTC

Thx so far everybody!

Yes, I also think that should be a nice low power cruncher. And with a TDP as low as 7.5 watts I hope that there won't be any thermal problems. Ofc there are also laptops with CPUs that need 35 watts or so and if you have a real graphics card that may use around 30 watts also. I'm sure you can't run those laptops without additional cooling 24/7. But the one I wanna get....how much power can it use overall when the screen is off? 15 watts maybe?

And look at the laptop which HAL9000 is running. The CPU has almost the same benchmark rating as the one I wanna get, the graphic unit seems to be similar, and he has an RAC of almost 2.5k on this machine!
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Message 1541475 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 10:51:09 UTC - in response to Message 1541471.  

You can certainly design a laptop than can get rid of ~70w of heat. A bit more copper, another heat pipe, bigger fan etc.

But then it wont be light, silent, or cheap.... (well maybe "pick any 2"? )
But of course people want their machines to be all the above, AND fast.
So corners get cut.

I'm not up to speed with the Intel GPUs and what versions are in the various CPU models, but I'd have to think that a low power CPU with 4 cores wont have a lot of spare GPU power?

I'd wonder if buying a better GPU for your desktop wouldn't be a better investment? Even if you only ran the PC 1/2 the time a GT750 card that needs no fancy PSU would boost things, and make your old Core 2 into a better PC? I mean a new model GT630 can get nearly 2000 RAC, and only add ~25w to your machine, and sells for about US$50.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7282947

Of course if you just want a nice little laptop and the price is right, then why not. ;)

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Message 1541486 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 11:33:26 UTC

All laptops by the vary nature of their design run hotter than is optimal for the

longest life of their hardware so even if you do not crunch any cooling you

provide will add to the life expectancy of your laptop.

Also there are several good temp. monitoring software packages available that can

throttle the cpu and gpu if they get too hot, I highly recommend using one.

Bare in mind that if the software crashes it can not throttle so checking once in

a while to see if it is too hot is not a bad idea.

As to laptop gpu's and crunching some can and some can't for ati ant chipset

5590 or later should work, intel driver have recently become available don't

know how many of them can now be used you will have to check by chipset number

do not know about nvidia once again must check by chipset number.

go luck, my current laptop is very weak but still doing between 70 and 90 rac per day.
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Message 1541540 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 14:25:03 UTC - in response to Message 1541471.  
Last modified: 14 Jul 2014, 14:36:17 UTC

Thx so far everybody!

Yes, I also think that should be a nice low power cruncher. And with a TDP as low as 7.5 watts I hope that there won't be any thermal problems. Ofc there are also laptops with CPUs that need 35 watts or so and if you have a real graphics card that may use around 30 watts also. I'm sure you can't run those laptops without additional cooling 24/7. But the one I wanna get....how much power can it use overall when the screen is off? 15 watts maybe?

And look at the laptop which HAL9000 is running. The CPU has almost the same benchmark rating as the one I wanna get, the graphic unit seems to be similar, and he has an RAC of almost 2.5k on this machine!

My Celeron J1900(Bay Trail-D) is actually a desktop machine. Specifically it is this MB http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900-ITX/. Also it has only been running for <3 weeks. So its RAC should go up a bit more before it stabilizes. Based on the daily number I am expecting around 3K RAC or so.
Comparing the two processors I would put money on the Pentium N3520 coming out faster. If it can stay at its "burst" frequency like my system is doing.
The Silvermont SoCs do seem to be a very nice "bang for the buck". I'm using a power supply that is far to large(525w), with two 3.5" HDDs so the PSU will stay on, & running balls out the system is drawing around 23w. Once I get a correctly sized PSU & switch to a 2.5" HDD I imagine the power draw will be <15w.

EDIT:
Also as far as the GPU crunching is concerned it runs fine even when I remote into the system with VNC. My older MoDT with the Intel chipset GMA graphics can be a bit sluggish in comparison for VNC. It isn't even doing any GPU computing! My main idea was to replace that older system with this one. Which sucks up almost 60W running 2 tasks at once... the nerve of that system!
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Message 1541608 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 17:06:55 UTC - in response to Message 1541540.  


I'd wonder if buying a better GPU for your desktop wouldn't be a better investment? Even if you only ran the PC 1/2 the time a GT750 card that needs no fancy PSU would boost things, and make your old Core 2 into a better PC? I mean a new model GT630 can get nearly 2000 RAC, and only add ~25w to your machine, and sells for about US$50.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=7282947

Of course if you just want a nice little laptop and the price is right, then why not. ;)

Ian

I was thinking about that also. But I guess that my desktop will soon die (when I press the button to turn it on it takes about 30 seconds to 1 minute until he actually starts; my last desktop had the same problem and it didn't take long until he didn't start at all), so I see no point in upgrading here.



Also there are several good temp. monitoring software packages available that can

throttle the cpu and gpu if they get too hot, I highly recommend using one.

Can you recommend one of those for Linux?




My Celeron J1900(Bay Trail-D) is actually a desktop machine. Specifically it is this MB http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900-ITX/. Also it has only been running for <3 weeks. So its RAC should go up a bit more before it stabilizes. Based on the daily number I am expecting around 3K RAC or so.
Comparing the two processors I would put money on the Pentium N3520 coming out faster. If it can stay at its "burst" frequency like my system is doing.
The Silvermont SoCs do seem to be a very nice "bang for the buck". I'm using a power supply that is far to large(525w), with two 3.5" HDDs so the PSU will stay on, & running balls out the system is drawing around 23w. Once I get a correctly sized PSU & switch to a 2.5" HDD I imagine the power draw will be <15w.

That's an interresting machine Hal, I really thought first that it's a laptop. And yeah, 2.5k RAC or more with such low power consumption is really nice. While all those mega crunchers with a lot of GPUs are quiet impressive I somehow like those low power crunchers a lot also.


Anyway folks, I got the laptop now. I'm really curious how it will do but I don't know when I will find the time to set it up. I never had a machine with Linux before, so I'm a complete noob here and have to get infos from the net to set everything up.
Ofc I could just install Windows, but I will give Linux a try, because it's always good to learn something new :-)


PS: Has anybody ever heard of Linpus Linux?
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Message 1541743 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 21:43:14 UTC

Using lm-sensors with Psensor gets the job done for some people.

For some people the Linux apps run slower because of some kind of power saving feature enabled by default. There is a thread about that somewhere that we can find if you end up with that issue.
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Message 1541768 - Posted: 14 Jul 2014, 22:46:12 UTC - in response to Message 1541743.  

Using lm-sensors with Psensor gets the job done for some people.

For some people the Linux apps run slower because of some kind of power saving feature enabled by default. There is a thread about that somewhere that we can find if you end up with that issue.

You might be thinking of Windows vs. Linux. To save you the hair-tearing, that link drops you in on the solution post of what was a long and argumentative thread - it was even longer before several posts were pruned.
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Message 1541973 - Posted: 15 Jul 2014, 10:44:57 UTC

Well it depends on what notebook you wanna buy. If it has Pentium.. I can say that quality wont be much - Pentium procesors are used only in lowend laptops. But Im not againts laptop computing. I am curently using 2-3 laptops for computing.

As others said.. buy a cooling pad - you will use him even if that laptop has a good cooling. If your laptop will overheat.. you can manually lower CPU frequency. How? Just write me message if you need.

About GPU - only Intel GPUs which can be used for computing are with Haswell CPU class - so Intel HD6400 and now I think even Sandy Bridge. Performance is not bad actually.. but of course.. nVIDIA will do better.

One on some benefits of computing on laptops is energy efficience. I guess you hardly oveceed 60-70 W consumption.. which is harldy achivable by any destkop PC.
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Message 1543310 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 17:52:09 UTC
Last modified: 17 Jul 2014, 17:52:53 UTC

Small update here folks:


I soon figured out that I don't have the time and nerves right now to learn linux, so I had to install Windows. I chose 8.1 because I couldn't find any Intel HD drivers for Windows 7.

I got a nice cooling pad with 2 fans and about an hour ago I started my first test run. Until now I only got tasks for CPU, but none for GPU. Beside that everything seems to run fine. Core temps are between 73 and 76 degrees (I guess that's ok for a laptop & it's pretty hot here atm, around 30 degrees), power consumption is 21 watts with screen on and 17-19 watts with screen off.

Any ideas why I don't get work for GPU?
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Message 1543324 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 18:29:26 UTC - in response to Message 1543310.  

have you set the settings up to do GPU work both on the client and in the account settings ? Others can tell you if it is because you have Intel graphic's chip or not . Don't think so thou
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Message 1543350 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 19:18:06 UTC

Yes, GPU use activated in both, seti account settings and client. The GPU is recognized, but no work for GPU is requested.

Some other things that I discoverd within the last hour:

- According to RealTemp the CPU is always running at 2.166 GHz but never goes into Burst (2.42 GHz). HAL9000 said that his CPU runs with Burst-Frequency all the time, so I wonder why mine doesn't?!?

- I suspended Seti and resumed it fter a few minutes and it took very long until the tasks showed progress again. They were stuck at the same percentage for about 10 minutes. I never saw something like that on my desktop.
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Message 1543359 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 19:26:23 UTC
Last modified: 17 Jul 2014, 19:28:42 UTC

I am using a HP 635 laptop with an AMD E-450 APU at 1.6 GHz. It runs SETI@home, Einstein@home and vLHC@home 24/7. The only changes I made to it are its DD3 RAM upped to 8 GB, and a 250 GB SSD substituting a 320 GB hard disk spinning at 5400 RPM. I positioned it on two plastic rods to allow a better cooling.OS SuSE Linux 13.1.
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Message 1543387 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 20:18:41 UTC - in response to Message 1543350.  
Last modified: 17 Jul 2014, 20:22:10 UTC

I soon figured out that I don't have the time and nerves right now to learn linux, so I had to install Windows. I chose 8.1 because I couldn't find any Intel HD drivers for Windows 7.

Any ideas why I don't get work for GPU?

You can always get their drivers from http://downloadcenter.intel.com
In your SETI@home preferences is Use Intel GPU set to Yes?

Yes, GPU use activated in both, seti account settings and client. The GPU is recognized, but no work for GPU is requested.

Some other things that I discoverd within the last hour:

- According to RealTemp the CPU is always running at 2.166 GHz but never goes into Burst (2.42 GHz). HAL9000 said that his CPU runs with Burst-Frequency all the time, so I wonder why mine doesn't?!?

- I suspended Seti and resumed it fter a few minutes and it took very long until the tasks showed progress again. They were stuck at the same percentage for about 10 minutes. I never saw something like that on my desktop.

Perhaps it is to warm to run in Burst mode? Your cores temps are well below the designed limit of 100ºC. I'll have to check mine and see what the temps are and where its cut over temp is for Burst.
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Message 1543438 - Posted: 17 Jul 2014, 21:14:52 UTC

Even if the two apps I'm using don't agree on the exact temps. The temps on my machine are much lower. The ambient room temp is about 82ºF/28ºC.
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Message 1543688 - Posted: 18 Jul 2014, 5:57:59 UTC - in response to Message 1543387.  

Perhaps it is to warm to run in Burst mode? Your cores temps are well below the designed limit of 100ºC.

Power settings on the laptop will also limit the CPU (and GPU) maximum frequencies.
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