[QUOTE=slandrum;583978]I have a many years old laptop that was cheap when I bought it, came with Windows 7 (was force updated to Windows 10 years ago back when Microsoft forced that on millions of unsuspecting people), but it is not years to complete a cat 4 exponent. It would be on the order of 5-6 months to do a fresh cat4 FTC PRP assignment. If I was silly enough to go out and look for much higher exponents with that machine, it could take years. I see a lot of people using less capable equipment than my old cheap laptop, but I really would not expect such equipment to generally be what students would have at their hands.[/QUOTE]
Let me share my personal routine. During the day, I use most of my computers for work and even though Prime95 could run in the background, it uses the lowest default priority 1, so that other apps could run normally. This slows down Prime95 substantially. Only at night, the computers are fully dedicated to GIMPS. Also, my i7 Gen10 laptop (bought last year) uses a default lower frequency to operate, and speeds up to 3.5 GHz when running Prime95 but it still lacks the performance of the previous generation i7 CPUs for desktop computers. My desktop computers are too slow to participate on a regular basis in the immediate ranges above 104,xxx,xxx (in Categories 1-3) which are dedicated to the exhaustive computations not to leave untested exponents behind. I am selecting occasionally Category 4 assignments close to Category 3 though. So, my intention is to upgrade gradually and still aim at the 100M-digit range (which is the silly enough part) in a few computers while in the remaining ones I would continue doing mostly DD, TF, and ECM.
|
