Remembering Turrican: Bench for a good cause (and buy a T-shirt)

[_mat_]

Dear community,

 

the most quiet time of the year is here, where we think about about our family and friends. This year we have lost a big part of the overclocking community, our dear Karl. So I would like to invite you to join us in honoring his name by participating in our donation campaign for an Austrian children hospital dedicated to researching cancer especially for young patients. The idea was born when you guys asked where you could donate to his family, but they wanted you to help the hospital instead. Now this idea is wrapped up the way Turrican would like it ...

 

 

To cut things short, overclockers.at (my site), our friends from Noctua and HWBot have teamed up to present you the Turrican Memorial Challenge! It's a contest with two stages using GPUPI, the benchmark I dedicated to Turrican a few weeks ago. The first stage is called "Turrican's choice" and focuses on old hardware. Run GPUPI in 1B on the oldest CPU possible and overclock the hell out of it afterwards. The oldest chip with the fastest run wins! Yes, you know you wouldn't stand a chance if Karl could participate.

The second stage is GPUPI in 1B for graphics cards all out. The fastest run wins, whatever it takes! We would like to see some crazy 290s on liquid nitrogen here, so be ready to refill your containers. But this contest should not be all about winning and prizes. Noctua, some of the guys there knew Turrican personally, will donate 1 Euro for every participant of this contest! So get ready to crunch some pi on your system, all of you can make this happen. The contest will start whenever HWBot is ready. It will be officially announced in the news.

 

In addition to the contest we have prepared something special to take the donation campaign to another level. At overclockers.at we have been giving out "Hardware Terminator" shirts for the winners of our little overclocking contests. It's Turrican's nickname that Monstru gave him when he visited Austria for an OC event in 2009. It kind of stuck and we made a couple of shirts just for fun. They were not for sale, they had to be earned by liquid nitrogen, sweat and blood.

 

Turrican wearing is his shirt surround by his most favorite toys.

 

For this donation campaign we've redesigned this shirts a bit and made them available in our web shop in multiple cuts and colors. They will be printed on demand in small by a little company here in Austria and shipped by us as soon as they are ready. To be able to buy one, you have to donate at least 5 Euros to the donation campaign. We let the amount of the donation open to your choosing. Every Euro is appreciated and will be directly forwarded as it is. The proceedings of the whole campaign will be officially handed over to St. Anna Kinderspital in February next year. More details on that as soon as possible.

 

I wish you all a merry christmas, have fun benching, get yourself a nice shirt and help us with this good cause!

 

Links: English web shop with international shipping | Turrican Memory Challenge (starts soon)

Edited December 25, 2014 by _mat_

[Mr.Scott]

Awesome. I will participate and donate.

Karl was an old school hardware aficionado. If in my lifetime I could acquire half the knowledge he had, I would be satisfied.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate.

[Dreadlockyx]

Great idea, really. The Hardware Guru would be proud.

I'm gettiny myself a shirt or two.

[Mr.Scott]

Mat, how old a cpu can you run this on?

I get this error on a Pentium 2 on XP SP3.

[GENiEBEN]

If I'm not mistaken he's using VS2013, which does not compile for XP unless specified in compiler options. Also SSE2 is a minimum, but can be disabled afaik.

[Mr.Scott]

If I'm not mistaken he's using VS2013, which does not compile for XP unless specified in compiler options. Also SSE2 is a minimum, but can be disabled afaik.

 

OK............but he says it's XP compatible.

GPUPI supports not only GPUs, but also CPU calculations. It needs at least OpenCL 1.x with double precision support. Target platform is Windows XP and later.

So it really isn't?

Also, there should be some minimum requirements listed somewhere then.

So what exactly is the oldest CPU this will run on?

Netburst processors (Pentium 4, Xeon, Celeron, Pentium D, Celeron D)

Via C7

A64

is what I come up with.

Edited December 28, 2014 by Mr.Scott

[havli]

If SSE2 is required, then the oldest supported CPU would be Pentium 4 1.4 and 1.5 GHz Willamette socket 423. Both introduced in Q3 2000.

Also - Windows 7 runs on this platform just fine, if necessary.

 

Its time to dust off my Abit TH7 RAID.

[Mr.Scott]

Also - Windows 7 runs on this platform just fine, if necessary.

 

Didn't really want to do this if I didn't have to.

I guess the 478 Willamette's would be the next oldest at Aug. of 2001

Northies after that.

Edited December 29, 2014 by Mr.Scott

[Leeghoofd]

Gonna grab me some t-shirts in respect of the Porsche Masta

[ObscureParadox]

Got my 423 socket ready to go actually. Never benched it before though.

[Massman]

The competition page is up and running.

 

Stage 1 isn't working 100% yet as for some reason the scores are not ranked by oldest CPU release but by score. Looking in to this right now.

[SoF]

Hope to find some time to pay my little tribute to Karl - he was truely outstanding and will always be remembered...

Great idea!

[_mat_]

First off a word about compatibility. I'm using the newest CUDA toolkit for best performance, but it doesn't support Windows XP. That's why GPUPI.exe and GPUPI_CUDA.exe won't work on XP and Server 2003. But the pure OpenCL version does. You just need the VS2013 redistributable and some OpenCL drivers of course.

 

As for OpenCL itself, it will need SSE3 support, so compatibility goes back to Pentium 4 (since Prescott) on Socket 478 and old AMD Athlon 64 (since Venice) on Socket 754. Here is an outdated list of CPUs with SSE3: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions_3

 

Also, there should be some minimum requirements listed somewhere then.

So what exactly is the oldest CPU this will run on?

Netburst processors (Pentium 4, Xeon, Celeron, Pentium D, Celeron D)

Via C7

A64

is what I come up with.

That's part of the challenge, as well as finding a working driver. Edited December 29, 2014 by _mat_

[Mr.Scott]

First off a word about compatibility. I'm using the newest CUDA toolkit for best performance, but it doesn't support Windows XP. That's why GPUPI.exe and GPUPI_CUDA.exe won't work on XP and Server 2003. But the pure OpenCL version does. You just need the VS2013 redistributable and some OpenCL drivers of course.

 

As for OpenCL itself, it will need SSE3 support, so compatibility goes back to Pentium 4 (since Prescott) on Socket 478 and old AMD Athlon 64 (since Venice) on Socket 754. Here is an outdated list of CPUs with SSE3: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions_3

 

That's part of the challenge, as well as finding a working driver.

 

Thanks Mat. The clarification makes it a bit easier to understand.

Maybe in an update you could include all of the required accessories needed to run this (except OpenCL drivers of course), maybe packaged in an installer? Just thinking out loud. Thanks again.

[Antinomy]

Excellent idea!

 

Karl loved old school hardware and has known a lot. Year of losses.

[Taloken]

Competition shared on Cowcotland.com !

 

Need a maximum communication about this for St. Anna Kinderspital ^^

[_mat_]

Nice, thanks!

[max1024]

Does downclocking is is allowed?

Please write ALL allow hardware and all software requirements. This version of Rules do not have correct conditions of competitions.

[ObscureParadox]

Does downclocking is is allowed?

Please write ALL allow hardware and all software requirements. This version of Rules do not have correct conditions of competitions.

 

Downclocking is counter productive as using older hardware with a fast time is what will win you this competition

[havli]

Oldest hardware with best score is good idea for sure. But how exactly is the best overall score determined?

 

For example - single-core CPU from 2004 finish the benchmark in 1 hour. Dual-core from 2005 scores 30 minutes... which one is better?

[_mat_]

CPU from 2004 will always win. But if you both have the same CPU, best score wins.

[max1024]

CPU from 2004 will always win. But if you both have the same CPU, best score wins.

Do NOT understand nothing, give us example, or better write a simple and clear criterias.

[max1024]

1-th place http://hwbot.org/submission/2714833 = 25pts and last place http://hwbot.org/submission/2710493 = 14pts Where is the logic about older HW ???

[Taloken]

GuyOne take a 2014 CPU and do a 5min run (figures for the example).

GuyTwo take a 2005 CPU and do a 50min run.

GuyThree take a 2005 CPU and do a 51min run.

 

The final podium wiil be :

1. GuyTwo

2. GuyThree

3. GuyOne

 

 

Can a modo add my run to the first stage please ? http://hwbot.org/submission/2715801_

Can't add it myself since i added the rig picture after the submission

 

Stage two with GTX 760 now ^^

[saint19]

So, if I am rigt...competition is with the oldest possible HW that run the benchmarks right?

 

Seems interesting, really interesting.

 

Could somebody help me to buy a T-Shirt? I am not sure that if I do it with International shipping, arrive someday.