View Full Version : $100 cruncher
zombie67
12-10-15, 05:58 PM
Hell, Windows 10 alone costs $99. Consider this buying win10 and get a free cruncher.
Kangaroo Mobile Desktop Computer (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883722001&cm_re=Kangaroo_Mobile_Desktop-_-83-722-001-_-Product)
Win10 64 bit
Four core (4 thread) Intel x64 CPU
2gb RAM
32gb SSD
HDMI, supports Displays up to 4k
Can also use an iPad as a monitor
internal battery
Fingerprint reader
wi-fi
bluetooth
microSD
0.52" x 3.17" x 4.88"
I wonder how the Intel Atom X5-Z8500 stacks up against the quad-core ARM processor running the Amazon Fire TV. I've got mine running WCG on BOINC 24/7, and I've thought about buying a couple more. $85/each for 4 cores and low power... tempting!
zombie67
12-10-15, 06:56 PM
Here is the thing: Only a few projects have apps for ARM. This is a real x64 CPU with real win64 OS. All but one or two projects have apps for that. ;)
scole of TSBT
12-10-15, 07:47 PM
TSBT is fond of low power systems.
zombie67 is correct that you have more project options with an Intel X64 Win system, but it still only has 2 GB RAM. Which is more than enough for a lot of project apps, but not all. Any heat issues on those systems?
And there's more than a few ARM android project apps; Collatz, Milkyway, Einstein, WCG OET, Seti, Seti Beta, CSG SubsetSum, Yoyo OGR, Moo! Wrapper, Universe, Enigma, Asteroids, Rosetta (if you're lucky), POGS and WuProp.
Here's some links to our discussions about the various systems...
http://www.tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=136
http://www.tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=140
This is a descent android TV box. Amlogic S802 2Ghz, quad core, 2G RAM, 8GB eMMC storage, $52 Amazon Prime http://amzn.com/B00JDCO22I
The RK3288 boxes are the fastest android TV systems I've seen. Cost a little more, probably worth it.
All the android TV systems use 10 watts or less. How many watts does the Intel system draw? The PSU output is rated at 36 watts.
zombie67
12-10-15, 08:14 PM
And there's more than a few ARM android project apps; Collatz, Milkyway, Einstein, WCG OET, Seti, Seti Beta, CSG SubsetSum, Yoyo OGR, Moo! Wrapper, Universe, Enigma, Asteroids, Rosetta (if you're lucky), POGS and WuProp.
Heh. In my book, that is "only a few". :)
Would purchasing such a thing for crunching actually even be worth it compared to your average budget desktop?
zombie67
12-10-15, 11:36 PM
Would purchasing such a thing for crunching actually even be worth it compared to your average budget desktop?
Depends on your goals. Is it low initial cost? Low operating cost? Credit? Hours? If you are looking for low operating costs and awesome hours, then 4 of these over a budget PC is the way to go.
Here comes Santa Claus ... maybe. A couple of days before we headed south for the winter the fan in the laptop I use to run the Asic miners crapped out so I had ot shut them down. Since we are going home for Christmas this might make an excellent replacement just for running RM35s :D
zombie67
12-10-15, 11:44 PM
Here comes Santa Claus ... maybe. A couple of days before we headed south for the winter the fan in the laptop I use to run the Asic miners crapped out so I had ot shut them down. Since we are going home for Christmas this might make an excellent replacement just for running RM35s :D
Yep! And with the internal battery like a laptop, it should deal with short term power outages nicely.
Shandia
12-11-15, 01:05 AM
Depends on your goals. Is it low initial cost? Low operating cost? Credit? Hours? If you are looking for low operating costs and awesome hours, then 4 of these over a budget PC is the way to go.
I like the way you put that "awesome hours". It would be some great wuprop and WCG feed for the power consumption. I may even look into a few of these myself. With streaming video being a thing, it would save on the electric bill for at least one tv here. (and increase by 4 cores at least)
I love the idea of stacking these up for big hours at low operating cost. Then I start doing the math... For the price of 5 or 6 if these little crunchers I could add a 24-thread Xeon machine with room for another GPU :D
Electric bill be damned... I may never learn!
I love the idea of stacking these up for big hours at low operating cost. Then I start doing the math... For the price of 5 or 6 if these little crunchers I could add a 24-thread Xeon machine with room for another GPU :D
Electric bill be damned... I may never learn!
I went through the same thought process a couple of days ago and reached the same conclusion =)) However, I think they will make a excellent machine for running a boatload of NCIs and BU miners! As Z pointed out, they have full blown Win 64 installed so if you stay within the RAM limitation you can run anything ... that is a big plus for my needs!
zombie67
12-11-15, 12:32 PM
I went through the same thought process a couple of days ago and reached the same conclusion =)) However, I think they will make a excellent machine for running a boatload of NCIs and BU miners! As Z pointed out, they have full blown Win 64 installed so if you stay within the RAM limitation you can run anything ... that is a big plus for my needs!
So you are going to buy one/some? Please report back!
One thing I can report back is "God help you if you need technical support". Their support people have absolutely no idea how a computer works :(
I called to see how much "user" memory was left of the 2Gb after Win10 boots. For the 1st few minutes they kept wanting to tell me how much storage was left. I finally got across to the guy that I didn't really care about storage I wanted to know about RAM. When he finally got what I was talking about he said he didn't have any problems running programs like Netflix etc. After a few minutes of that I explained I didn't give a damn about streaming video etc I just wanted to know how much memory I had to run MY programs. He went to check with someone else and told me I would have to call Microsoft for the answer. I thanked him and hung up. BTW, he thought I had one so earlier he told me to look at "Task Manager".
So I was on their webpage and I got a popup for live chat from their support people so I tried again. After asking about remaining usable memory I got a long dissertation on how much storage I would have. After explaining once again that I was interested in RAM the support tech said they would check. They came back with the answer of 2Gb. Wow, so you guys have RAM available just for the OS and there is a full 2Gb left for the user and I was told YES.
A couple of hours later I decided to try the phone support again. Wouldn't you know it I got a hold of the same support tech. So I asked him again and I was told again that I needed to contact Microsoft. I asked him why I needed to do that when what I wanted to know was what their product did. I said all you have to do is boot the damn thing and look at Task Mgr like you told me to do earlier. So he finally did that and Win10 is using 1.1G at initial boot.
The bottom line is you have a max of 900M left for programs. QCN takes 101M so you can't even run ALL the NCI projects without getting into the pagefile ... that probably would work okay on NCI tasks.
Can someone tell me how much memory is required to run a BU 20GHz WU?
@Z Depending on the above answer I'll probably order 1-3 of the suckers.
Dave gpu
12-11-15, 04:32 PM
No slot for a GPU :))
No slot for a GPU :))
Even if it did have a slot I don't think the processor would have the balls to keep it fed :D
Anybody home?
Can someone tell me how much memory is required to run a BU 20GHz WU?
Couldn't you reinstall Windows using the original product key, but select 32-bit? That version only requires 1Gb RAM.
Couldn't you reinstall Windows using the original product key, but select 32-bit? That version only requires 1Gb RAM.
Dunno. It may not have a standard BIOS that would allow that. It may just have an image on the memory card that is setup specifically to run that machine.
If it has a BIOS that allows booting off of USB then you could probably get it to work.
scole of TSBT
12-12-15, 06:11 PM
Anybody home?
Can someone tell me how much memory is required to run a BU 20GHz WU?
According to reb, about 5MB http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/forum_thread.php?id=1000#10672
According to reb, about 5MB http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/forum_thread.php?id=1000#10672
Thanks Steve, that is what I was hoping to hear. I'm going to order some of the toy computers and see if I can get the BU miners back up and running while we're home for Christmas.
EDIT: 3 on the way :D
Started playing with one of them :D
Very easy setup. Installed TeamViewer and BOINC. I have WuProp and 4 NCI tasks running and right now I'm running some BU CPU for hours/playing. Looking at the WU hash rate versus I7-3930 it appears that the Kangaroo core is approx 1/3 the speed of a 3930 thread. So from a crunching standpoint all 4 cores are about equivalent to one of the cruncher threads. From a WuProp standpoint it produces 4X the hours.
I tired a quick BU Asic setup and I couldn't get it to work. Did the Zadig driver update and BU downloaded tasks but the miners didn't turn on. I tried running my stand alone Cgminer app and it didn't find the miner. It can never be easy!!!!
Can someone think of a project that has VERY short WU for WIndows CPU?
BTW, it is very small ... about the size of a cell phone.
I hope you can get your BU setup working! If you're looking for short-running work units, try Enigma. A couple of the SRBase apps are short running, but I'm concerned those would generate too much heat for a fanless CPU.
Started playing with one of them :D
Very easy setup. Installed TeamViewer and BOINC. I have WuProp and 4 NCI tasks running and right now I'm running some BU CPU for hours/playing. Looking at the WU hash rate versus I7-3930 it appears that the Kangaroo core is approx 1/3 the speed of a 3930 thread. So from a crunching standpoint all 4 cores are about equivalent to one of the cruncher threads. From a WuProp standpoint it produces 4X the hours.
I tired a quick BU Asic setup and I couldn't get it to work. Did the Zadig driver update and BU downloaded tasks but the miners didn't turn on. I tried running my stand alone Cgminer app and it didn't find the miner. It can never be easy!!!!
Can someone think of a project that has VERY short WU for WIndows CPU?
BTW, it is very small ... about the size of a cell phone.
You could also work a project like Rosetta where you can tell how long to let the WU run..
Dave gpu
12-19-15, 03:46 PM
Started playing with one of them :D
Very easy setup. Installed TeamViewer and BOINC. I have WuProp and 4 NCI tasks running and right now I'm running some BU CPU for hours/playing. Looking at the WU hash rate versus I7-3930 it appears that the Kangaroo core is approx 1/3 the speed of a 3930 thread. So from a crunching standpoint all 4 cores are about equivalent to one of the cruncher threads. From a WuProp standpoint it produces 4X the hours.
I tired a quick BU Asic setup and I couldn't get it to work. Did the Zadig driver update and BU downloaded tasks but the miners didn't turn on. I tried running my stand alone Cgminer app and it didn't find the miner. It can never be easy!!!!
Can someone think of a project that has VERY short WU for WIndows CPU?
BTW, it is very small ... about the size of a cell phone.
Try Micro Collatz Conjecture made for small cpu.:cool:
Try Micro Collatz Conjecture made for small cpu.:cool:
That might actually work quite well because you can only get micros on 1.5ghz processors or slower. As I recall, they aren't necessarily short.
UPDATE:
I don't think the Collatz Micro will run on Windows. I tried to download some and it wouldn't give me any. Those are for Android and Arm machines.
I haven't done anymore on trying to get BU running on the Kangaroos. There are some gotchas that make them unusable for my "remote" application. There is no BIOS so I can't set them up to reboot on a power failure. I use that feature to reboot machines if they get hung up ... I cycle the power on a programmable power strip. When these are plugged in they go into a charging/standby mode until you press the power button. Also, since it is Win 10 it does the automatic update thing which is unacceptable to me.
They are excellent for stars/hours and that is the way I will use them. I'll take them back to TX after Christmas and use them where I can push the button if needed :D
I figured out a solution for running my miners. I was using an old laptop but the fan crapped out 2 days before we headed south. I finally remembered that we had a small HP Netbook which is a tiny Win7 computer w/ a dual core Atom processor. We used to use that for email when we traveled. I blew the dust off and now I have it controlling some RM35s so I'm back in business :D
One nice thing about coming back to CO for Christmas is that I have the machines crunching SRBase full bore and heat is no issue at all. When it is 30 degrees outside all you have to do is open the window slightly =))
EDIT: I found out how to stop the automatic update.
Dave gpu
12-22-15, 09:03 PM
UPDATE:
I don't think the Collatz Micro will run on Windows. I tried to download some and it wouldn't give me any. Those are for Android and Arm machines.
I haven't done anymore on trying to get BU running on the Kangaroos. There are some gotchas that make them unusable for my "remote" application. There is no BIOS so I can't set them up to reboot on a power failure. I use that feature to reboot machines if they get hung up ... I cycle the power on a programmable power strip. When these are plugged in they go into a charging/standby mode until you press the power button. Also, since it is Win 10 it does the automatic update thing which is unacceptable to me.
They are excellent for stars/hours and that is the way I will use them. I'll take them back to TX after Christmas and use them where I can push the button if needed :D
I figured out a solution for running my miners. I was using an old laptop but the fan crapped out 2 days before we headed south. I finally remembered that we had a small HP Netbook which is a tiny Win7 computer w/ a dual core Atom processor. We used to use that for email when we traveled. I blew the dust off and now I have it controlling some RM35s so I'm back in business :D
One nice thing about coming back to CO for Christmas is that I have the machines crunching SRBase full bore and heat is no issue at all. When it is 30 degrees outside all you have to do is open the window slightly =))
EDIT:: I found out how to stop the automatic update.
Micro Collatz Conjecture
From Slicker
A few people have requested Micro Collatz work units for CPUs on Windows and Linux. Because not everyone wants them due to their short duration, I have added logic such that it will send the Micro work units only if the Measured Integer Speed is 4294 million ops/second or less. That number was chosen as it equates to that of a Intel E2160 Core 2 Duo running @ 1.8Ghz which is the slowest CPU I currently own but capable of running the Mini Collatz work units. In other words, it was a somewhat random choice and can be easily changed if the consensus is to make it either larger or smaller. The goal is so that those with older slower CPUs can receive Micro Collatz work units and complete them in a reasonable amount of time while keeping faster CPUs crunching for > 30 minutes. So, please let me know if this change causes any problems.
Interesting Dave. I tried again with the same result that "no tasks for Micro" are available. The server shows 40 but maybe it is truly out of work.
zombie67
12-22-15, 11:12 PM
So, please let me know if this change causes any problems.
Did you ask him to raise the limit to a faster CPU?
Bryan is good at making CPU's seem slower than they really are. :D
Did you ask him to raise the limit to a faster CPU?
No need Z, the integer benchmark is 3650 and that is below his cutoff. They should be good to go. I don't know if there is any work. The server has been showing 40 WU available for the past 3 days and it hasn't changed. WuProp shows that 323 WU were done yesterday however.
Bryan is good at making CPU's seem slower than they really are. :D
I've been known to downclock them on occaision =))
Dave gpu
12-23-15, 04:40 PM
Interesting Dave. I tried again with the same result that "no tasks for Micro" are available. The server shows 40 but maybe it is truly out of work.
I tried to, but no luck fired up my old rig that used to run Micros,but all i got was Collatz Sieve v1.20 cpu 26 hours to complete.
Will let you know if i get Micros.
Will let you know if i get Micros.
Thanks Dave!
scole of TSBT
12-24-15, 06:10 AM
Under the project applications, it only lists micro for android and raspberry pi systems.
http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/apps.php
Create an android VM...http://www.howtogeek.com/164570/how-to-install-android-in-virtualbox/
Never done it, so don't know if it works.
Probably won't work because that VM will be on an "Intel" CPU rather than "ARM" so the binaries won't work.
I'd love to be proven wrong though. :D
scole of TSBT
12-24-15, 11:35 AM
Project application list says it has a micro app for Android x86. Just need to get an x86 android VM running.
Dang! I should read those App lists more often! No where did I put that Android VM I made years ago... :)
I think the next challenge may be finding a somewhat recent version of BOINC compiled for Android x86. :)
I ran a few Micro Collatz on my Fire TV... very long running WUs, lots of heat, and the credits aren't that great. I'm sticking with WCG on this device.
I ran a few Micro Collatz on my Fire TV... very long running WUs, lots of heat, and the credits aren't that great. I'm sticking with WCG on this device.
But does it report as a different app on WuProp? That's the real question. :)
scole of TSBT
12-24-15, 12:20 PM
But does it report as a different app on WuProp? That's the real question. :)
Micro Collatz Conjecture
I ran a few Micro Collatz on my Fire TV... very long running WUs, lots of heat, and the credits aren't that great. I'm sticking with WCG on this device.
I'm just looking for 100 hours worth :))
Here's another low-power $100 cruncher (today only), it has a dual-core Intel CPU and can support Linux or Windows: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856501011
Difference with this $100 option is it doesn't come with Operating system like the other one did.
Has all needed hardware. Have to add the OS
zombie67
02-06-16, 10:03 AM
Hell, Windows 10 alone costs $99. Consider this buying win10 and get a free cruncher.
Kangaroo Mobile Desktop Computer (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883722001&cm_re=Kangaroo_Mobile_Desktop-_-83-722-001-_-Product)
Win10 64 bit
Four core (4 thread) Intel x64 CPU
2gb RAM
32gb SSD
HDMI, supports Displays up to 4k
Can also use an iPad as a monitor
internal battery
Fingerprint reader
wi-fi
bluetooth
microSD
0.52" x 3.17" x 4.88"
They now have a Plus version. It comes with double the RAM (4gb) and double the storage (64gb), but without Windows. So you will have to supply your own OS. $170.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856659001&cm_re=kangaroo-_-56-659-001-_-Product
Haunted Forest
02-08-16, 10:38 AM
Hey Guys, I have been testing two of these Supermicro X8DTT-F-SG007 on one powersupply and one radiator. I just grabbed two more for $42 each-ebay, I bought a lot of 8 E5530 hyperthreading 4 cores for $6 per chip. That is a 16 thread machine for close to 100 bucks. Next I will see if all 4 boards run on one 360mm radiator. Windows 10 was a free install if you loaded it off a created media, not sure if that still works though.
HF
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.4 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.