Get a water cooler and analyse the positions with (max cores-1) and no HT.leavenfish wrote: Not so much 'novelties'...rather my repertoire is rather offbeat, but some do transpose into main lines. I was 2399 ICCF when I quit...people were clearly starting to use engines while I wasn't. But I do fancy getting back into that...and to be on more equal footing!
I'm thinking most common AMD CPU's would not work well as their APU are more for graphics. I presume a 4gh APU would not work as well as a 4ghz Intel.
I'm thinking I may get a stock i7-6700 at 3.4ghz unit from HP or Dell...might be all I need if I use my laptop for non-chess items. I do wonder though, would cooling be an issue if I left that on crunching chess positions for a day or two at a time?
Regarding openings, its a good idea to use online op. books, or CB or CA´s last opening encyclopaedias. You can use Aquarium too, a good program but not intuitive and still buggy.
What´s really bad about corr. chess is that people are using engines to play middlegame and complex endgames, not the openings... so correspondence chess is a very different game (like "Internet Chess", as GM Nigel Short once said).
Actually for OTB players, according to many friends of mine (NMs, FMs, IMs and GMs at my local chess club), corr.chess is not good at all and may hurt or worsen your chess:
- time controls are too large, too different;
- engines are being used widely in every phase of the game: an engine move is often a "mistery";
- if you reach an ending with 7 or less pieces, will you play it perfectly ? "Playing with tablebases" and "analysing with tablebases" are very different things. GMs don´t play endings perfectly, tablebases do.
- what if your opponent uses a much faster computer than yours ?
- You should "find" positions that engines don´t understand well,out of the openings or in the middlegame, so that human intervention matters. That´s not an easy task nowadays, as engines are getting better and better. Those positions exist, but probably you would never play them OTB, unless you are Jobava, Morozevich or Nakamura, haha.