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The official Old School is Best School Round 5 thread.


Massman

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Managed to solve the first problem and it was just a matter of disk space. Added another harddrive and ran SuperPi from that one. Unfortunatly Dr.Watson pops upp and throws an exception just before SuperPi is finished. I haven't seen live what exactly happens since the round finishes either when I'm at work or at night, but my guess is that there is some problem when SuperPi is doing the last stuff, writing to file and what not.

 

Has anyone managed to run a 32M SPi? Anything below is just fine, 16k-8M, but 32M just wont work.

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I have one running atm, but it will not be finished in time. No big difference really, just trying NTFS instead of FAT16.

 

I think as someone mentioned in another thread that maybe Win2k works better if you can get it to run on Socket 3. Parhaps a Pentium Overdrive will do the trick? Looked at some on ebay when this stage was announced, but they were a bit on the expensive side.

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As said, I was unable to find any result for this at database, but who knows, maybe it is possible - checked the 3d stage, for me result is final. Also checked the challengers, apart from mobile stage results are final for me as well, but maybe it changes if I overlooked something^^

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The test was run 2 days long, and when i saw i'm out of time, i stop it. I have no exception or any error before i stop it, so i guess its possible to get a result in pi 32m with socket3. :)

That is not true.

People have finished the iterations without error but errored in the final output.

Don't speculate. Either you finish the run or you didn't.

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The problem is not the run itself, it's when SuperPi are finalizing the calculation the errors occurs.

 

 

 

 

 

The test was run 2 days long, and when i saw i'm out of time, i stop it. I have no exception or any error before i stop it, so i guess its possible to get a result in pi 32m with socket3. :)
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I didn't know about this thread. I tried also:

- change amount of memory, now 96 MB because of destroyed poor 32 MB ones :(

- change system from NT4.0 which is annoying as s... and no USB support without mods. Mods not poss to be done on such slow system.

- change motherboard

- add PCI external controllers (CMD or Silicon Image 680). the SI680 is very good and I have even done a trick - CF card to store SPI salculations (1GB is enough, huh?)(on AMD K5 it was enough )

- Pagefile on the same drive as system

 

I haven't tried the trick with changing time just before every 24 hrs. (maybe it's better to change time every 12 hours? Or better 11h:50min?).

I will be back and some day I will do this extremely extreme SPI32 MB on 486.

 

There's also so much other problems. For example not reliable ISA connectors - might be dirt on connecitons. There is also possibility that CMOS battery was leaked which is very common issue on old motherboards and there might be some "cutted" electrical paths. For example normal path has 0.2 ohm and the oxidised can have few oms and leakage would make some non-linear behaviours at high freqs. The paths are made of copper. Long time ago before silicon and germanium there was copper oxide rectifiers - the non linear el. parts. The most scarry thing for me is that L2 cache or CPU pins can be covered by dirt and dust or some oxidate things. This might cause problems even after few hrs of counting SPI...

 

Ahh, this is very hard and good UPS is needed. Good PSU is also not bad idea.

 

I have 2 motherboards but non of those is for shure rock stable. Both pass memtest, but SPI is behaving differently, and there we are back to the question "is the instability caused by system realtime clock". It would be nice to ask the maker of SPI if he included some "security features" for example scarry user won't unplug the PSU so program is closing automatically after "long time" when "long time" is defined by 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds or something like that.

 

These are my ideas. What other ideas do you have ppl?

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I don't have a stability problem as such since SuperPi gladly continue through all the way. It has something to do with the last things out does, moving data, writing to file and what not. I can do 8MB without any problem. I would like to try my setup with a Pentium overdrive and see if it's 486 related.

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