I regularly read questions from Gridcoin users who would like to know how much they can earn with their system and which BOINC project would be the best option.
Earnings are derived from the RAC output of BOINC projects and are mainly determined by the type of CPU (or GPU but this article will focus on CPUs only). Because there are so many different CPU types in the market, it would be impossible to build an overview with actual RAC output for all of them, even if you would have access to all hardware and software.
An alternative method is to calculate the RAC based on returned project work-units. Even though it doesn’t provide a 100% accurate RAC value for all systems, which is impossible due to a variety of reasons, it would still provide a reasonable number that can be used as a baseline to calculate the earnings and select a project.
Last summer, I started capturing WU results on various project websites to calculate the RAC output per CPU. To ensure I wouldn’t overload any project server, I only sent a (page view) request every 10 seconds (or maximum 8500 requests / 60Mb per day) and have build-up sample set which I’m now using to calculate the RAC for a wide range of CPUs.
Calculated RAC
I used the following method to calculate the system RAC:
The formula is built with the following elements:
- Σ points of sample set, is the amount of points credited by the project for the returned results (column 4 in tables below)
- Σ time of sample set, is the total time it took to process all returned WUs (column 3 in tables below)
- Σ CPU threads, is the number of CPU course x CPU threads. I assumed in my calculations that multithreading is enabled in the BIOS (column 5 in tables below)
Two other important factors:
- The higher the number of returned WUs, the more accurate the RAC value (column 2 in tables below)
- The calculated RAC is based on running SRBase as only project on a sysetm, with 100% CPU utilisation and 24/7
Calculated RAC for CPUs crunching SRBase
In the coming weeks I will publish a series of articles for most whitelisted projects with an overview of CPUs and their calculated RAC.
Today I will start with SRBase, for which I have gathered 1,700,000 WUs resulting in 2 tables with 620 CPU types in total. There are even more CPU types in the market but I have omitted any for which I didn’t capture results.
Next to the calculated RAC, I have included a column with GRC earnings as well but because this is changing regularly, you can always take the latest value from my weekly project stats update on Steemit (last version here).
I have put every effort in providing accurate RAC values but the output is as good as the results taken from the SRBase website.
Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions where I’m open to make any modifications to the calculation presented above.
And here are the tables:
AMD CPUs
Intel CPUs
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