RMouse wrote:Thank you! glad to be here. I know that I should do well since I have a very high end Core 2 Duo. Not quite the highest clock speed, but 2.4 ghz is nothing to sneeze at. We'll see how high up the chain I can go. I dont intend to stop folding no matter what.
I might be due for a new computer in the next 6 months. Can anyone recommend a good video card that would come with a Dell laptop? Right now I have a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M and as powerful as that is, I want more. If I know in advance, I can hopefully steer my IT guy into getting me a better folder.
I hate to burst your bubble, but neither piece of hardware is remotely high-end in 2012. A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo was high-end in 2006, when the previous generation of processors all had one core and adding a second one with shared cache and everything was groundbreaking. But 2.4 GHz for a C2D was rather slow towards the end of the Core architecture's life; the E8600 at stock ran at 3.33 GHz, roughly 40% faster than yours, not factoring in how high you could push it through overclocking. Now, I grant that you've got a laptop, and with that comes heat and power limitations that restrict how fast you can get the processor to run, but it's still not accurate to call it "very high end." Your base $500 Dell desktop today comes with a 3.3 GHz dual-core processor, and today's chips have a couple of generations of architectural improvements that will result in them performing faster on a clock-for-clock basis than your C2D.
Looking at the specs, the Quadro NVS 160M has 8 shaders. That puts it on par with a 9300M GS, which was a bottom-tier laptop chip in 2007/2008. From my understanding Quadro chips usually have some features enabled that business users would need much more often than regular consumers, but I don't think any of them would make FAH run any faster. By comparison, today's GPUs have hundreds if not thousands of shaders, and while you can't compare shaders from back then on an exact 1:1 basis with the shaders in today's chips, suffice it to say the 8 present in the Quadro you have is extremely lightweight in comparison.
Now, the good news is you appear to have an opportunity for a major upgrade coming up, and it's not on your dime, which is even better. It seems like most of the lower-cost Dell business laptops don't even bother with a discrete GPU now that Intel's integrated graphics have gotten to the point where they're not completely terrible. Currently Intel integrated GPUs cannot fold, so that wouldn't do you any good. If your company's willing to consider a model that actually has a discrete GPU (I have no idea how much your company usually spends on employee laptops), and assuming you actually have a choice between Nvidia and AMD, I'd probably lean towards Nvidia. In the desktop realm, Nvidia cards still outperform AMD cards of comparable price, and AMD cards unfortunately require almost an entire CPU core to fold due to the way the drivers are programmed, which will reduce your CPU's folding performance. The workstation cards that both companies make are extremely similar to the regular desktop ones, so I'd expect that trend to hold true in the workstation realm.
Here's the current mobile Quadro comparison sheet; you'd want as many shaders (they officially call them CUDA Parallel Processing Cores) as you could get them to buy for you. Note that they've got the previous and current architectures on there; the models that start with K are based on Kepler, the current architecture, which has a lot more shaders than the non-K models, which were based on Fermi, but I believe each Kepler shader is less powerful than a Fermi shader. As a point of comparison, the 5010M (Fermi) has 384 shaders while the K5000M (Kepler) has 1344, but I believe the K5000M would only be, say 20% more powerful even though it technically has over 3 times the number of shaders.
I can't find a handy spreadsheet for AMD's mobile workstation chips, so
this will have to suffice (only take note of the ones called FirePro, as the FireGLs are rather old and no longer made). Like with Nvidia, more shaders = better performance. There's not too much choice here.
You may be better off trying to get them to buy you a better CPU; ideally you'd get both, but it appears there's more CPU upgrade options in the middle tiers than GPU options. If you can get them to bump you up to a quad-core, that'd be great. Extra speed on that quad-core would be nice, but usually the price starts going up exponentially at the upper end of the market without a marked increase in clock rate.
Also, just to make sure, you do have permission to run FAH on your work computer, right? The Pande Group takes permission very seriously, as they do not want the software run on someone's computer without their knowledge and that person thinking it's a virus or something. They require you to have permission to run the client if you don't own the machine yourself. The EULA actually states that you need written permission in a situation like this so that there's a physical record of your being allowed to run this; if you get a new head of IT or something, you have more than just your word that the previous one was okay with you running it.
Just to be clear, it wasn't my intent to belittle your contribution; I just want you to have a more accurate understanding of how powerful your current hardware is. Your contribution is just as welcome and valid as anyone else's, and I hope you stick around for the long haul, contributing whatever you can.
