The new Hexus Teams - Setting up Folding at Home

[Tattysnuc]

Hey guys,

great to see some activity over here at last. I'm away on holiday at the moment and like the feedback. Not entirely sure what by way of incentives can be obtained for prizes, but if we start small and then build from there, then surely it can only build from there.

I like the idea of a "folder of the month" spread, that floats my boat. Regarding the "our stats" page, I'm going to see what's available from http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com - it would seem a shame to manually have to copy what is already an automated process. I'll have a play over the next week or so at trying to get some data out and see what sort of work is involved in publishing a stats section for all us Hexus folders.

If anyone can show me how to embed a picture so that it appears in a forum post rather than the link appearing then I'd appreciate it, then I can start the threads in question.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Really was starting to think that folding was long since dead over here.

Mike (Tattysnuc)

[Champman99]

Hey,

I'm about to start folding again having bought a few new bits, (after the little burning out GPU incident)

I didnt want folding to adversely affect my server, so I've got a little seperate folding machine under construction

Its an X2 5000 45nm which I hope will unlock to 4 cores, meaning 1 core can feed the 8800GT leaving 3 for SMP folding.

And really nice to see some activity in the HeXus folding team

[Englander]

It may also be an idea make a thread in GD to inform the masses of the latest push for folding when we're ready - GD gets vastly more views than this place!

[TAKTAK]

Oooh, i think i need to keep an eye on stats a bit more, when did my PPD take a pounding?, I'm only pulling in ~2k :/

[Queelis]

Its an X2 5000 45nm which I hope will unlock to 4 cores, meaning 1 core can feed the 8800GT leaving 3 for SMP folding.

If you do unlock 4 cores, make sure you enable the "-smp 4" flag, since nVidia GPU client doesn't use much of the CPU at all, enabling you to fold with almost all 4 cores (unlike ATI GPU, which eats up basically a whole core).

As for my folding, I'm thinking of pausing for a while - the temperatures are said to hit 35 Celsius in the following days, and my whiney heatsink is bugging the hell out of me

[Englander]

If you do unlock 4 cores, make sure you enable the "-smp 4" flag, since nVidia GPU client doesn't use much of the CPU at all, enabling you to fold with almost all 4 cores (unlike ATI GPU, which eats up basically a whole core).

As for my folding, I'm thinking of pausing for a while - the temperatures are said to hit 35 Celsius in the following days, and my whiney heatsink is bugging the hell out of me

What name do you fold under?

Temperatures in London are set to get very toasty too (not quite 35*C, thankfully) so depending on quite how hot, I'll have to see about my folding. And I seriously suggest getting a decent aftermarket cooler for your graphics card - the one for my 8800GT knocked 20*C off the temp and is doesn't go WWHHHHHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ like the stock one did lol

[Tattysnuc]

It may also be an idea make a thread in GD to inform the masses of the latest push for folding when we're ready - GD gets vastly more views than this place!

Thats an excellent suggestion - I've got tomorrow off work, so I'll take the pics of my rigs and get the "get yer (folding) bits out..." thread started in earnest. I've been looking at what Biz-tech do, and it's given me some food for thought.

So far the suggestions are:

1. Photos of rigs sections
2. Hexus dedicated stats thread
3. Put a thread in the General Discussion thread to direct traffic over to the distributed computing

If anyone's got anything else to add, or I've missed anything (sorry) then please reply and suitably repromand me.

- Tattysnuc -

[Champman99]

I already have a vortexx neo for the 8800GT, but the room of all computerage is also air conned - so shouldnt be a problem.

The burnout on the last 8800GT happened when a little bit of plastic fell in it, preventing the fan from spinning. Toasty.

Interesting about using all four cores, I'll have to see about stability etc of the unlock because stability and accuracy of calculations is obviously important. Previously I've always run dual core so I think what I did is just run one GPU client and one standard CPU client. Or perhaps I ran one GPU client and then an SMP client on reduced priority. Used to give me about 6k ppd, 5.5 from the GPU and 500 from CPU folding.

[Queelis]

What name do you fold under?

Temperatures in London are set to get very toasty too (not quite 35*C, thankfully) so depending on quite how hot, I'll have to see about my folding. And I seriously suggest getting a decent aftermarket cooler for your graphics card - the one for my 8800GT knocked 20*C off the temp and is doesn't go WWHHHHHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ like the stock one did lol

Queelis, just like here.

And the GPU is not a worry for me, I've a non-reference Sapphire HD4830, so it's really quiet and for my gaming needs (most often only CSS, some Portal and NFS:Shift) I most often leave the fan fixed at 46% and the temperature stays within 60 degrees. I don't fold with the GPU, since with ATI it's not really worthwhile, I leave only CPU SMP client on (and currently the temperature is a cool 46 degrees load (considering outside it's 30-32), but the CPU fan spins at a snappy 5200RPM, in the morning it was 5700 So that's my worry, planning on getting a Zalman Performa or a Flex - really great coolers for a relatively low price. )

[Englander]

Folding thread in GD bumped, should give us a few more views

[Champman99]

Got everything nicely set up again from a personal standpoint but dissapointing to see we are still only at 20 active members or so.

Its such a good cause and the people on HeXus are just the type of people that have powerful hardware thats left on 24/7 anyway doing nothing. Even if you werent getting seriously involved with GPUs and the like its easy enough to have the Uniprocessor tray client running while your browsing or something isnt it? Thats the way folding used to be before high performance clients. I just had the uniprocessor client installed on my mums laptop and she never even noticed it was there.

In my experience on other sites its actually quite unusual for a hardware and technology site as big and popular as hexus to have such a small folding team.

I'm running the SMP terminal client on my main gaming rid on standard idle prio and I'm finding I can happily game on the majority without needing to shut it down as I dont find it interfereing with my FPS at all. With so many games still single threaded you may as well be using that extra core imo!

Currently I have (more details on the two highest producers in the seperate thread)
Folding machine running SMP and GPU
Main rig running SMP
Server running Uniprocessor
Laptop running SMP. Its an 8600M GS in the laptop which is supposed to be supported, but I cant get it to work just feeds me "unstable machine" back all the time. (Any ideas welcome, latest drivers are installed, im thinking possibly it actually needs a driver rollback, not sure)

Also this latest push as far as I'm concerned with folding is the first time I've bothered with a passkey. I dont know how significant the bonuses are at all, but it took about 10 seconds to get it and can just copy and paste from the email into the client, so why not?!

[Marcos]

Can I tell the Mac client to not burn at 100% CPU? If could dedicate 40-50% of my CPU during the night to folding then i probs would leave it on every night.

I've stopped running the PS3's client, 200w every night is no good for the environment or my bills

[Queelis]

Can I tell the Mac client to not burn at 100% CPU? If could dedicate 40-50% of my CPU during the night to folding then i probs would leave it on every night.

I've stopped running the PS3's client, 200w every night is no good for the environment or my bills

Isn't there such an option when you run F@H with the -configonly tag? Either in the basic, or the advanced options.

[Queelis]

God I hate the 6041 project, takes me four days to finish one WU :/

[Englander]

Interesting, the GPU ones I'm getting are going at a rate of 1 every 1.5-2 hours!

[Englander]

I've just installed the uniprocessor client just because I can and was wondering how the "allow receipt of work units >10MB yadadada" tick box effects PPD. I've always just ticked it but wonder if someone can saev me a few days of experimentation by telling me what it does to PPD!