Folding Chit-Chat

[Teamsreth]

Oh well, looks like the 4890 will have to be sold then.

[Englander]

there are quite a few of us who have just had our best month as well.....

1.4 days until we have a new no. 1!

[Tattysnuc]

Pah! It wont last.....

[Domestic_Ginger]

I was hoping for something good regarding the new openCL update.

Someone posted this on another forum OpenCL/Radeon vs CUDA/Geforce (are they still Geforces?).

Would be nice if ATI cards would get the same if not more points than Nvidia ones; as someone said it would be great just to see what it does to team EVGA! With no direct comparison or an understanding of whether both codes are optimised it is not pointed out an apples to apples comparison.

[Terbinator]

But the GeForces can use OpenCL anyway.

[Tattysnuc]

I'm not entirely sure what all this means, but it does look as though the ATI units have a lot more under the hood in a GPGPU role than they have got accessible. All cudos (or should that be cuda's.... ) for NVidia for seeing this opportunity and delivering it. ATI need to be closer to their market and it seems from these types of reports that they are far from on the button, or just not willing to invest in their product in the way that NVidia have done. Be great to see everyone able to use a GPU to process, ATI or NVidia, and be even greater to hunt down some of the bigger teams who have a sole investment in NVidia/Intel architecture.

Hate to say it though, those SR1 boards are awesome. I was disappointed not see Asus do a flavour, or even worse no Opteron equivalent. AMD really have lost their place on the server market if us enthusiasts don't have a way to play on them....

[1stRaven]

Pah! It wont last.....

not if your points keep increasing...

btw, congrats on the ten million!

[Tattysnuc]

I wish! I've assembled a rig that was supposed to be on ebay just to get this far. It's good that we are as close as we are, and the response from the community has been tremendous. I've read comments that seem to imply that this is a one horse team, but looking at the participation, that couldn't be any less true. We've increased to 40 active users which just goes to show the power that a little exposure and banter can have on capturing the imagination. I don;t think for a minute that we will be able to continue at this rate indefinitely, but a couple of new faces certainly adds to it all.

Long term I'm going to have one hex core running at about 4.2ghz 24/7 and one gaming rig hex core running (bills permitting).
Beyond that, there will be a Q6600 and 8800GTX HTPC probably running 24/7 and my wife's rig, but otherwise that is all I'm planning on. The 950es will probably go into a benching rig to test my boreas project, leaving me with a Gigabyte UD5 (rev 1) heading toward ebay next. Basically I'm at capacity now, but I think I can get up to about 200k ppd with a prevailing wind, but i'll probably be knocking out 70k ppd consistently.

Got to get my projects under way:

1. Server migration (fully w/c RIIE board 980X @ 4.2Ghz, 5Tb Raid array instead of a 3.46Ghz 3Tb Raid array all on a single 2.120 Rad)
2. w/c HTPC rig (Q6600 @ ?? + 8800 GTX )
3. GTX 295 repaired to go into my w/c 980X server.
4. Benching rig (P6T + 950es)
5. w/c Boreas to use on the above until it is finalised, whereby i'll make one for each rig )


Thx for the heads up on 10 mill. Pleased I reached it with time to spare so that I can now "help" lighten the load a little for everyone else. Didn't think I'd hit it until tomorrow sometime!

###Heads up###
It's nearly time for the Chimp challenge. That means that most of the big teams main members switch to a different team for a week duration - we should gain a little ground on some of the other teams while they are distracted with that

[Golden Dragoon]

Hate to say it though, those SR1 boards are awesome. I was disappointed not see Asus do a flavour, or even worse no Opteron equivalent. AMD really have lost their place on the server market if us enthusiasts don't have a way to play on them....

I may have missed something as I have been busy this week, but what SR1 board?

###Heads up###
It's nearly time for the Chimp challenge. That means that most of the big teams main members switch to a different team for a week duration - we should gain a little ground on some of the other teams while they are distracted with that

I wonder if any of them will head our way

[Terbinator]

I may have missed something as I have been busy this week, but what SR1 board?

SR1 is the dogs nads of X58, AFAIK - Dual-socket quad sli and so on, made by EVGA...

[Tattysnuc]

Couldn't have worded it better myself. It's a dual Xeon board - like a Skulltrail board that Intel did a couple of years ago, basically a server board that overclocks.
The bigger folding teams are using them as they can each 150k ppd per board on the CPU alone due to the really short return times.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/mot...-sr-2-review/1

PS. It's actually the SR-2 that I meant, not SR-1

[Tattysnuc]

I may have missed something as I have been busy this week, but what SR1 board?



I wonder if any of them will head our way

Doubt it. They go off to make a new team which has a monkey based name (CPChimps etc) and then race to a folding total. Last year the total was 20 million, and it was done in less that 24 hours! There's all sorts of suggestions at the moment about what the target should be as it was reached so quickly. The upside of this is that some monkey named teams gets several hundreds of millions of points in a short period of time, and the main teams slow to a more natural pace while their main community continue folding. IF we just keep going we should see that some of the teams slow, albeit momentarily, and we get to close in a bit quicker.

[scaryjim]

... Beyond that, there will be a Q6600 and 8800GTX HTPC probably running 24/7 ...

Now wishing to dissuade you from this noble course of action in the folding cause, but before you commit to it I should let you know that this combination will pull more than 150W at idle, and probably over 300W when both the GPU and CPU are loaded up with folding (I'm afraid my watt-metre is elsewhere soI can't give you an exact figure on what Kali's currently pulling). That might raise a few eyebrows in the Tatty household when the leccy bill comes in...

[Jay]

bloody power cut! thats going to cost me some points

[Tattysnuc]

Now wishing to dissuade you from this noble course of action in the folding cause, but before you commit to it I should let you know that this combination will pull more than 150W at idle, and probably over 300W when both the GPU and CPU are loaded up with folding (I'm afraid my watt-metre is elsewhere soI can't give you an exact figure on what Kali's currently pulling). That might raise a few eyebrows in the Tatty household when the leccy bill comes in...

I'll blame it on the bar heater and leccy fire we've got in our bedroom. We've got no heating up on our attic floor where we sleep. In the winter it's too cold, so we have a heater ona timer, and in the summer I've got an air con unit that gets the room down from 30+ degrees (that's the top temp it displays!) to a more palatable 19C. The downside is our leccy bill is £130+ per month. At least with folding I get a warm room and save of the gas...

I'll keep telling myself that. We need double glazing and a better boiler, but right now it's all working, so if it aint broke..... Fold.

[Golden Dragoon]

I would certainly fold 24/7 at all times if my council hadn't canceled the grant money that was to pay 50% of the cost of the solar panels we were going to get fitted looked like they would have been a good investment with a grant, 2.5kw I think, could power my house + folding for free with that lol but at retail price they are just too much.

Currently we are on a "green" energy plan at the insistence of swmbo, it is a little bit more expensive, but she says every little helps, I say the electric still comes from the coal and gas plants, and they are just planting some trees somewhere to "offset" the carbon emissions so why not just get the cheaper one and sow our seed elsewhere?