Folding Forum

There are a lot of topics in this forum which have extremely weak links to FAH. I understand that folks are proud of their hardware, but when we added a forum for hardware was somewhat of a compromise with our primary goal of being a Help forum for FAH. We are NOT a hardware-oriented forum, but hardware is obviously an important factor for FAH. There are a lot of sites on the web where photos of outstanding systems are encouraged; we are not one of them. On this forum, we are impressed with systems based on PPD or a similar FAH-oriented quality factor.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of your system. Please confine the WOW LOOK AT THIS type of topics to the "Anything goes" forum. Anything posted there is temporary and will be deleted after a time, but you CAN impress your friends there. (I'd really love to post pictures from my family on a recent trip to Hawaii -- me sitting on the beach with my laptop reading this forum -- but that, too, would be inconsistent with the goals of this forum.)

Please post permanent discussions of your system elsewhere and give us a single post with the FAH-related numbers and a link to that topic.

. . . and one of these days this forum is going to be "cleaned up" too, but that's a manual process instead of an automated one like pruning the "anything goes" forum.

All I can say is that you have your work cut out for you.

95% of the threads on this forum are hardware discussions.

Honestly, sometimes that stance makes things difficult for average folders. I've been searching for months for a list with the top nvidia video cards, regarding point earning. Heck, I'm not so much of a hardware guy and I need people to point out to me which stuff does the work better. Recently, I bought a quad laptop with an Nvidia card, without too much research, hoping that it would be good for folding@home. ((It's pretty good actually!)) I'm a molecular biology/genetics student who hardly understands about shaders and has no clue whatsoever of overclocking and how it's done. All I want is to help the best way I can and hardware reviews is a way to open up to the big public, I think. How many people out there want to help folding@home, but only know as much as to install a program? Why not build a gate towards these guys, as an advice resource when they want to get a new system that will contribute to folding@home the best way they can?

Stop putting words in my mouth that I did not say.

A list of GPUs and their expected PPD is certainly within the scope of the forum. (Are you sure there isn't one already?) I didn't say that hardware could not be discussed -- but those discussions need to focus specifically on FAH performance.

It should be clear that pictures of a beautiful rig do not help others to improve their folding performance. If you're proud of your rig's appearance, show those pictures where they will not become a permanent part of a FAH Help forum.

Here is one PPD thread about NV cards...

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=3193

There are threads for specifc card models as well, like the GTX 460.

These tend to appear in the GPU client sections, not the hardware section, because the primary discuss is about fah performance, not about hardware.

?

It would have been nice to notify me that my thread on my new Magny-Cours dual Opteron 6168 setup would be unceremoniously dumped into the "Anything Goes" section and then auto-pruned due to inactivity. I was surprised today to look for it, as I had some updates to put in, but it was nowhere to be found.

And before you ask, yes I did perform a search

The thread was added in response to this post by Trotador earlier in the BigAdv A3 Frame Times thread requesting related PPD vs. power consumption:

http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 45#p153886

It was not a "look at me fold thread" as I only posted a photo of the hardware, and all the PPD vs. power consumption information that I had at the time. Additionally, I put it there to help people see what a fairly uncommon set up is like in terms of power usage, F@H performance and general choices like CPU heat sinks and cases for larger motherboards like this.

But it's nice to see that other threads that have resulted in SR-2 configurations are left alone, because there aren't very many SR-2 threads out there in folding-based forum land. Nope, none that I can see.

Not to start a war here but I think what Bruce is saying is that the purpose of this project is to help other people by using your computer as a tool for someone else's research. This is good but don't pat yourself on the back for it. Find more things you can do to help other people.

This an old topic. I know that because the last post was made by 7im and he died some three years ago.

We both believe(d) that we're here to support the FAH software, not to review the details of anyone's hardware. Let's try to keep that goal in mind.

jeffmr4 wrote:...the purpose of this project is to help other people by using your computer as a tool for someone else's research...

If you're wondering who uses F@H for their research, then it would be the Folding@home Consortium and more details are available here: https://foldingathome.org/about/the-fol ... onsortium/