Dedicated Prime95 rig

[Phantomas]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

No need for a monitor with Windows either, simply download UltraVNC (which is free), and you can easily access it visually through another PC on the network, or even over the internet if you set up port forwarding for it.

And no need for a graphics card either, but you cant use VNC, and must use the Windows-RemoteDesktop-Feature....

[lavalamp]

Originally Posted by Phantomas

And no need for a graphics card either, but you cant use VNC, and must use the Windows-RemoteDesktop-Feature....

Why can't VNC be used?

[S485122]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

If you can stretch to it, an E8200 may perform significantly better than a Celeron due to a much larger cache (6 MB), and the overclocking headroom in the lower models is quite large. With a little patience and luck it seems you can add over another GHz to the stock clock.

The assesment by that person that the computer is Prime95 stable has to be taken with a grain of salt (well a rock of salt actually.) Going from 2,66 GHz to 3,92 GHz is quite a lot. Once you reach a "stable" speed, you should back up some 10 to 20 % with a resulting speed of 3,2GHz or 3,5 GHz if you are daring. Another thing to consider is that sometimes an increase in CPU speed can result in an effective increase in effective average iteration times when running real tests. You would not want to increase the current error rate and worse have your computer running for worthless resultzs...

Jacob

[Phantomas]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

Why can't VNC be used?

It seems, that vnc needs/uses the existing framebuffer of a graphicscard. No card, no buffer. Windows DesktopRemote seems to work like a graphic-card simulation.

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by hj47

+++ Also, is there any advantage in running a 64 bit OS as opposed to a 32 bit?

Yes. The next version of prime95 will have a few tweaks using the extra registers. Not a big difference, but every little bit helps.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Phantomas

It seems, that vnc needs/uses the existing framebuffer of a graphicscard. No card, no buffer. Windows DesktopRemote seems to work like a graphic-card simulation.

Yes, I concur with that. With VNC you always get the remote system's screen resolution presented on your monitoring system. With WRD you get the native resolution of your monitoring system.

Just to be clear what I mean. I have my monitoring system with a native resolution of 1400x1050 and the remote system running P95 is 1280x720.

With VNC I get a small window of 1280x720 presented to me that is an exact duplicate of what the remote system is displaying (they work simultaneously and both display everything that is happening, including mouse movements).

With WRD I get a full screen window 1400x1050 to work with and the remote system is logged out displaying the log in screen. The mouse movements are not echoed to the remote system. Indeed the OS starts an entirely new session for the monitoring system on the remote system with two copies of "winlogin.exe" running in the task list.

The only catch is that you need Windows Professional (or higher) on the remote system to run WRD. It needs the terminal services driver running also.

[eidt]
One thing to be careful about if security is important. WRD is an encrypted session and is better suited to Internet monitoring IMO. VNC (at least the version I have) is not an encrypted session.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by retina

Yes, I concur with that. With VNC you always get the remote system's screen resolution presented on your monitoring system. With WRD you get the native resolution of your monitoring system.

Just to be clear what I mean. I have my monitoring system with a native resolution of 1400x1050 and the remote system running P95 is 1280x720.

With VNC I get a small window of 1280x720 presented to me that is an exact duplicate of what the remote system is displaying (they work simultaneously and both display everything that is happening, including mouse movements).

With WRD I get a full screen window 1400x1050 to work with and the remote system is logged out displaying the log in screen. The mouse movements are not echoed to the remote system. Indeed the OS starts an entirely new session for the monitoring system on the remote system with two copies of "winlogin.exe" running in the task list.

The only catch is that you need Windows Professional (or higher) on the remote system to run WRD. It needs the terminal services driver running also.

On Linux you can set the VNC server to serve up exactly whatever resolution you want. For example, on a friend of mine's machines which he manages via VNC while away, he starts the VNC server with a shell script that runs the following command:

vncserver -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24

Also, like WRD, VNC on Linux starts an entirely separate session of the username it's run under. (Note: some implementations of VNC, such as the "Remote Desktop" feature built into Ubuntu and possibly some other GNOME-based distros, behave more like the Windows version, i.e. taking direct control of the console session. My friend is using Ubuntu, but we installed TightVNC, which uses the separate-session method, on his machines and are using that instead of the built-in VNC server.)

The VNC session can be started with whatever resolution you'd like--though admittedly, unlike WRD, it does not dynamically resize the resolution based on a setting in the connecting client. VNC's resolution setting is set on the server, though under Linux it does not have to be the same as the console session's resolution due to it starting a whole new session.

[eidt]
One thing to be careful about if security is important. WRD is an encrypted session and is better suited to Internet monitoring IMO. VNC (at least the version I have) is not an encrypted session.

Hmm...I didn't know WRD was encrypted. I've always heard that it was unencrypted, like VNC.

The free versions of VNC are all unencrypted; some for-pay versions of some distros of VNC have encryption options. However, the easiest way to encrypt a VNC session--for free--is to tunnel it through an SSH connection. This can be done with a command like this:

ssh user@remote-host -L 1234:127.0.0.1:5900

The above command will start a tunnel to port 5900 (i.e. the default VNC port) on the remote machine, and pipe it through to 1234 on the local machine. Then, on the local machine you can set your VNC client to talk to 127.0.0.1 port 1234, and it will connect to the remote server's VNC desktop, through the encrypted SSH tunnel.

[lavalamp]

For secure VNC over t'internet, I just use Hamachi, it's a free VPN.