I recently did a bit of switching motherboards and CPUs between mine and my wife’s PCs. She got the Abit AB9 and Core 2 Duo E6300, I got the Gigabyte P35-DS3L and quad-core Q9300. Yes, I fared better :) . But my wife didn’t really give a rat’s about it anyway. To sweeten the deal, I installed a shiny new copy of the Windows 7 RC, which I am quite impressed with. Especially with the backup function of it - much improved over the clunky XP backup. With the upcoming free antivirus from Microsoft, they are nearly at the stage of releasing an OS that can almost wipe its own bum, rather than rely on a myriad of third-party software to perform basic system functions.

But I digress. Because what this post is all about is running the linux Folding@home SMP client under a virtual machine in Windows. I initially gave it a go when the quad-core was running XP, and installed two of the notfred folding images, running under VMWare player. Folding performance nearly doubled, from around the 2000 points per day the WinSMP client got, to around 4000ppd. The only drawback was that VMWare player only supports two virtual CPUs, requiring two instances to be installed. I always wanted to run it under linux natively with four cores, so I did the system swap. It was pretty trouble-free - just plug the hard drive with the install from the previous system into the new motherboard, and Ubuntu picked up nearly all the changes in its stride. I had to do a bit of dicking about to get the network up and running again, but it was all good.

I have since overclocked the Q9300 to 3GHz, running the FSB at 400MHz rather than the standard 333. Folding now gets ~5500ppd from this machine, combined with the Win7 E6300 which gets around 2000ppd, I am now consistently over 7000 points per day, and climbing up the rankings.

The machine is running like a dream. Just figuring out now what the next upgrade will be: a new screen that can show full HD (1920x1080) or a solid state hard drive. Decisions, decisions.