Anyone out there Folding@Home?

Congrats, Mark, and I assume you will be passing me in about two weeks - great folding!

 

Anyone able to give me a little video card advice? I have some extra birthday money left, and wanted to add a video card capable of crunching some extra units. Like to keep it sub-$100 if possible, but am finding the info on the fah website very confusing both as far as what cards will work, and then how to set them up. Thanks for any help.

 

Any information I could give you would be dwarfed by what you could find at the folding forum. Folding Forum • Index page

They are quite accustomed to offing advice.

 

Cheers! Didn't realize they had a forum.

 

New video card on the way! NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ should be good for some serious points (relative to what I'm generating now), assuming I can get it up and folding.

 

You couldn't have done better for the price. I just put one of them in a computer for my son who is interested in photo editing. Would have been interesting to see what it would do with folding, but for the present, that doesn't interest him. He's making his contribution to medicine as an ER physician.

When you are ready to install, take a look at Folding@home - WinGPUGuide
I found that easy enough to follow, but the forum is available if you have problems. My experience is limited to the "systray version" and it has worked flawlessly.

Keep us posted.

 

Guess we'll have to let him slide. For now.

Thanks for the link. Card should be to me Monday or Tuesday, but I have a huge work project due this Thursday, so may not get it installed until the weekend.

 

I'm such a dork. Card was installed within 30 minutes of its arrival . . . .

It's burning through a work unit right now - done 1200/15000 in about 10 minutes. Hopefully it will be stable and really start adding some points to the team.

 

Congratulations!! After a few days it would be interesting to hear what your points per day are.

Folding is similar to donating blood in that if more people knew how easy it is they would do it.

 

Damn Microsoft updates !

Makes my chart of points over 3 months look like a Sine Wave !!!

I built a home-theater PC with an nVidia 9800 GTX card and use that for folding. While it's GPU folding I can still watch HDTV encoded videos, even .MKV files encoded 720p.

GPU folding is much more stable than CPU SMP folding, which always seems to break within six months. Then I have to fully reinstall SMP, sometimes I switch from Deino to the other, then back.

What's cool is how cheap used nVidia's 9800 GTX & subsets can be bought for, second best upgrade to a used PC after maxing out the RAM.

 

is this still worth doing??

ive been running it for about a month now..
also used 8 machines, and accoring to my kill-a-watt metter it says ive used 72 kWhs.

i would be intrested in running more machines, even buying a QUAD core machine, if this really does help cures,etc...

 

GPU folding really was a step forward, have it running on 2 GPU's for over a year now

 

Yeah, the videocards really seem to be the way to go. I had three computers going before, one a dual core, and my max weekly points was just south of 8000.

With the new video card I put into one of the boxes that has to be on all the time (for now) at the office, I just ran almost 40,000 points during the first week of operation (still have one more update before the first week is officially done, so it will probably cross 40k).

The video card was +/- $100, which I'm guessing is substantially less than a new quad core box.

Cheers,

Dave

 

Using an nVidia 9800 card, or two, instead of CPU folding, uses less electricity.

I remember seeing on Tom's Hardware site, where they used a Kill-A-Watt and different rig configs, to find out the cheapest ratio of points per watt.

AMD 3800 and a 9800 was the cheapest. When only the card is working hard, the hard disk can power down and the cpu fan can throttle down, assuming you put the computer rig in max savings mode in the Bios.

Worst was the most powerful Intel Quads + latest & greatest nVidia, while producing a huge amount of points, costing a huge amount of juice.

If you want, people, send me your hardware to me in Montreal, Quebec. Where I pay a paltry 0.35 / kwH year round.
(that's in Can currency!)

For example, I have no natural gas setup. Five months out of the year is constant below 30 degrees F. I heat using base board heaters. I have a heated swimming pool.
A teenager that likes long showers.

My monthly bill, on a yearly plan, is 120$ per month. Two folding machines on 24/7.

In contrast, my TV + Internet + Telephone utilities bill, from the Cable Co, is 140$ per month. Without Pay TV or a movies plan.

So I can imagine someone in the US where electricity is 10x more expensive than what I pay, might have a problem justifying 26$/month for folding.

Answer: do it at work. Stick a nVidia 9800 GT(x) in your office computer. :rockon:

 

"bump" of this thread in the forums ! I passed 3M points !

My new office computer is a nVidia powerhouse with 3x EVGA GTS 250 (about 100$ each) driving my 3-screen workstation, and a 4-core AMD 9500.

So when I finish work, I scheduled at 6pm every day to start up three GPU consoles and a SMP console.

A quick test last week showed a 18k PPD potential if left 24hrs, which will happen over weekends.

IOW, I now have an excellent foot-warmer under my desk - waste heat put to good use.

We have to keep PriusChat under the TOP 200 bar...


EDIT: I noticed one problem running GPU consoles during the day when I work. Remote Desktop becomes very slow. So I'll leave it running on one screen, I rarely connect more than two sessions at the same time. Third screen is my email mostly, so I'll run a client 24/7 on that.

Edit 2 : How did I do it? Bought cheap whenever possible
- Fav Part : USB Creative X-Fi external sound card. Beautiful.
- Asus M4N82 motherboard 3xPCIe
- AMD 9500 quad core
- EVGA GTS250 512MB DDR3
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W
- Thermaltake V9 box
- 2x2G Corsair DDR2-1066 (running at 800)
- A gazillion hard drives, boot is a Seagate SATA 500G

Nothing overclocked - takes forever to boot back to where I was before, I prefer stability. External sound cards are the best for noisy computers and environments, no background buzzing.
Ironic, it's cheaper than the equivalent internal card - for which there was no room for anyways.

Edit 3 : Installed on XP, not Vista. Console is better than Systray versions, more stable. MPI is easier to setup SMP than DEINO is.

- I created folders: C:\Folding, C:\Folding\SMP, C:\Folding\GPU0, C:\Folding\GPU2, C:\Folding\GPU2
- Installed MPI SMP version into the smp dir
- Unzipped the Console GPU into each of the GPU0..2 directories
- Start, Run, CMD. CD \Folding\SMP, Install. Start the EXE with -config
- CD \Folding\GPU0, start EXE with -GPU 0, do config, Machine ID 2, then Ctrl+C
- CD \Folding\GPU1, start EXE with -GPU 1, do config, Machine ID 3, then Ctrl+C
- CD \Folding\GPU2, start EXE with -GPU 2, do config, Machine ID 4, then Ctrl+C
- Start, Run, C:\Folding\SMP
- Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tool, Scheduled Tasks
- In Scheduled Tasks configured all four Folding@Home clients one-by-one, and set properties
(Run only if logged on, extra parameters to the .exe, etc)
- Set focus the the SMP folder
- Drag & Drop Folding@Home EXE from SMP into Scheduled Tasks, rename it, schedule it
- Added the -smp parameter at the end of the .exe to be sure
- Change to C:\Folding\GPU0 in the SMP window (from where I dragged the .exe from)
- Drag & Drop the Folding@Home GPU EXE into Scheduled Taskes, rename to GPU0 & schedule
- Added the -gpu 0 parameter in the properties. Important, lowercase, spaces
- Repeat for GPU1 and GPU2

* It is a good idea to schedule advanced properties. Set a start date of yesterday, and enable Repeat Tasks Every...like every hour, for 12 hours, starting when you don't use your PC.
* I also use AUTOLOG.exe, so if Microsoft sends a Critical Update and reboots my computer, it will log in again on a reboot. Then at the next hour, Scheduled Task will kick in the jobs.

I predict cheap and high-PPD cards like the nVidia's 8800GT/9800GT to be at 50$ or less within six months. My GTS250's cost me 110$ each brand new (wholesale).

 

Congrats on the 3 million points!

 

Thanks Jeannie.

 

I've added my ps3 and my main home computer to the priuschat team, had no idea we had a team till i stumbled upon it at one of the stat hosting sites, hope to have my secondary computer up and running on the team as soon as i get over to it, might possibly get my lap top on it too but it's not a very good number cruncher I don't expect i'll be up there in the 3million point range anytime soon but hey, my idle cpu cycles are going to good causes and i can get behind that.

 

:welcome:

Welcome to the team! We're kind of quiet, folding away in the background. It's taken years to get to 2.75 million - 5 clients, 2 'cpu' and 3 'smp'. But the points DO add up - as a team we have over 28 million points.:cheer2: