Glad to hear that another one of my favorite hardware sites has joined the fray (yes, i've been reading them every day for a few months now). I'm currently on team HardOCP, currently fending off the number 1 spot from a few crazy aussies (overclockers austrailia). From up top here, you guys are pretty small.. but I think you guys should do a good amount of work to climb up. We could use the competition, and the assistance in putting those aussies in their place!
Anyway, I invite you guys to the [H]ard DC forum - http://www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=32
We have lots of information (useful and useless) there, and it is the home of a handy utility for monitoring F@H2 progress, Electron Microscope III.
To answer some questions -
AMD or Intel?
The Athlon/Duron (of any core) is king. They are the fastest of any processor out there. For K6/K6-2/K6-3's, however, the Pentium/PPro/PII/PIII/Celeron/C2 will blow them away. For reference, a 200MHz Pentium Pro CPU will be faster than a K6-2 450, and meet or beat a K6-2 500 (more on this later). F@H2 doesn't really care about L2 cache, as long as its there. A Celeron 300A will blow away both the K6-2 450 and 500, for reference. However, an Athlon/Duron will beat the P4 and P4 Xeon.
What should I do to get my Institution/School/Job to supply the PC's?
PLEASE, ASK before putting Distributed Computing clients on PC's that ARENT YOURS! There are a few people getting SUED over this, and it really isn't worth losing your job (and a rather expensive lawsuit that may involve jail time) over this. Ask the one in charge of the organization (CEO, President, Principal, Superintendent) or the one in charge of the computers in the institution (CIO, IS manager, whatever).
Thats about it for now.. I'm not going to make this into a really long post. Welcome aboard and hope to see you with us at the top!
.:Ttocs - Team HardOCP
