Drivers and CPU cycles?

[Prospero]

I will be setting up a second pc, primarily to be used for RC5 cracking, and was wondering. Do things like sound cards eat processor cycles? I have a spare of about everything now, should I even bother puting in anything but a nic and video card? Just kind of curious on this one, I've never thought about it before. Thanks for your help.

Prospero

[bkehoe]

Hi,
If the sound card is sitting idle it shouldn't eat up any cycles, but it it is playing away with midi, wav, and mp3s you will loose valuable cycles.

Brendan

[cwizard]

You don't need anything for RC5 but the basics, cpu, video, i/o device. You can run the contest off a floppy but I found that slowed the output since there is a constant interaction with the disk as the blocks are processed.

For example, I am running several machines with one monitor. I have a monitor extensions cable and keep the monitor off. I check the machines once a day to make sure they are still running properly by transferring the monitor between them. Of course, you need to turn the monitor OFF when moving the cable from machine to machine.

Bottom line is that you can crack with a video card and floppy. Nothing else is really needed.

[bkehoe]

Don't even need a vid card!

If you set up a Linux boot from floppy. Hey it can be done - I did it anyway - if anyone wants the URL email me.

Just get your RAM, motherboard, processor, network card, and floppy.

Configure the networking core on the floppy. put in the disk, switch on and wait.

After the boot, telnet in from your main computer and start RC5!

I'll supply the URL of the ite for anyone that wants it. Just have to go and look it up.

Brendan

[bkehoe]

URL is

http://www.linuxrouter.org/modmaker

also look at http://www.linuxrouter.org

Brendan

[ccalvert]

I was just reading through your forums, and I found this thread. I am not sure if anyone here knows about it, but there is a self contained client disk image that you can put on a floppy if you would like. It is still kind of a beta/preview release, but it is specialy built from the ground up for this sort of thing. You can find it at http://www.eng.utah.edu/~grahn/sccd/index.html . Hope this helps.

BTW, the next release is planed to have a built in webserver to view client logs (currently working), write to disk support so that you can optionaly have the computer automaticly resume cracking upon its next boot from the floppy (A few major bugs to be fixed when I get some time), and the ability to optionaly set up the networking via DHCP (I plan to put that in after I get around to fixing the write to disk).