I have a computer running on a Pentium 4 processor with hyper-threading and 2GB of RAM. Would this still be good for crunching, or is it just a waste of power? My main computer can crunch tasks in 3 hours or less, but this computer takes about 10 hours for each one.

I take that back. One of the tasks is nearing the 15 hour mark, and around 80% complete.

The answer Intel would not want to hear : The Pentium 4 has been a waste of power since the Pentium III was introduced ... well, at least since the Tualatin version came out.

This refers to the efficiency, not to the plain crunching power - but I would rather reactivate my dual PIII 1266s than the PIV board that I still have in the shelves.

A PIV (or a hyperthreaded S604 Xeon) would make perfect sense to help bring a vacation house through the winter, if you had an electrical frost protection heater. But then it should clock down, when temperature raises above the minimum temperature you have to keep.

I'm not joking, I have such a house and if it had internet access, I would try to find a solution for that because I hate to use those electrical heaters without having any positive side effect (like crunching).

In my computer list there is an pentium4 m and pentium3 tualatin. The p4 ist faster, because of sse2!

But on the whole the old computer are too inefficient. Compared to modern cpus as amds kabini or intel pentium.

In my computer list there is an pentium4 m and pentium3 tualatin. The p4 ist faster, because of sse2!

But on the whole the old computer are too inefficient. Compared to modern cpus as amds kabini or intel pentium.

I have not tried it but am guessing they would be plenty fast enough to run an asic miner though! Bitcoin Utopia, a Boinc project that is helping to fun other Boinc projects thru Bitcoin mining, can use asic miners. It can use cpu's and gpu's too, but as stated the cpu's on an older machine may not work, but since alot of miners are plugged into a standard usb port, it should be able to handle it just fine.

There were two basic version of the Pentium 4 in its later life: Northwood, which was good and reasonably power-efficient, and the later Prescott, which wasn't. I think with the 2 MB cache, you have the Prescott; the Northwood had 512 kB (L2). But the longer pipeline in the Prescott required a larger cache to ameliorate the effects of cache-misses.

Intel adopted the more energy-efficient Banias core (originally developed for laptop PCs) for their next line of CPUs, which became the Core and later Core 2 series. I still use a Core2 Duo (E8400) to support a couple of GPUs. It also works OK on Asteroid, but I would not use anything earlier.

Thanks for all your interesting replies. I use my main computer for most of the crunching anyway. I just figured what the heck, let's add 2 more processors, even if they are a little slow.

This computer doesn't crunch very fast, gets really hot, and it probably is very inefficient. I'll just stick with the computers that our family normally uses. (I'll probably boot up the linux drive just to finish up tasks. Maybe I'll take it to the library sometime... :P)