Folding Forum

Hello my dear FAH friends and colleagues.

I have a business as company trainer in the sector of car manufacturing in Germany. To reduce my profit I'm looking into ways of spending the hard earned cash on things that help others (and so me...). The Germans otherwise take all the nice shiny stuff and ask for it via health and pension insurance, and of course, a hefty tax... That's why I have come up with the idea of buying one folding rig. The budget is around 1000€.

My office PC already has the WorldCommunityGrid client (also known as BOINC iirc). That one uses a loooot of CPU power. And I found out I cannot (and should not) run these two clients at the same time => system hangs up, hard reboot necessary.

So I've come up with the idea of selling my training lessons with the treat that I will also support science from the money people pay for my lessons, thereby attracting goodwill from technical people in the companies I'm working for. That should be a nice gimmick for my own business in that way, too. I will also include it in my advertisement, and promote that on my website (still have to figure out how to quote FAH-status, but that can be done later). So I will be able to deduce those expenses from my profit!

As I primarily would like to support via GPU calculation, here goes the following rig.
My thoughts: It should be expandable for the use of a second GPU. The CPU should not be used that much in FAH-work, so a cosy i5-6600K should be ok, probably undervolted, also a good cooler for that one. RAM-Speed can be crucial, especially if I add the second GPU, what's your opinion? SSD yes, but a bigger one need not be, right?

SanDisk Plus 120GB, SATA (SDSSDA-120G-G26)
Crucial Ballistix Elite DIMM Kit 16GB, DDR4-3000, CL16 (BLE2C8G4D30AEEA)
EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX 3.0 Black Edition, 8GB GDDR5, DVI, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort (08G-P4-5173-KR)
MSI Z170A PC Mate (7971-001R)
Thermalright HR-02 Macho Rev. B (100700726)
Cooltek K2 3.0 Full-Black (600045677)
be quiet! Straight Power 10 600W ATX 2.4 (E10-600W/BN232)

One good question: Should I go for the 1080 right away? Price does not matter much.

Welcome Mortal1978,

Nice plan and I hope it would work out for you. But better talk with a tax expert in current German Income tax rules. At least in the past they didn't accept expenses not direct linked to the income generation as "Liebhaberei"; making those expenses not deductable. Also have a look at energy cost; specially if you also want to expense it.

As for SSD a 128GB is for sure enough for folding. I use one too; but actually not needed; if you have a disk it's good enough.
For GPU: 1070 is great. Sure a 1080 gets you higher points per day; if that is relevant for you. Depends on what you feel to want to invest.

Summery: ask a tax expert or the Finanzamt ...

Thanks a lot, ChristianVirtual!

I checked the legal term "Liebhaberei" and it fits to entrepreneurial actions which are not intended to maximise profit or achieve long-term advantages for the business. So maybe I should reconsider my rig, not in the intention of having a full-blown thingy which causes horrendous e-bills. But rather it should show: yes, Dr. WWW cares for science and research and is willing to show that in a business context to get some attraction.

Following this line of thought, I would rebuild it and say, i3-6320, MSI matx ECO, 8 GB 2133 RAM and a 1060 3GB should look decent enough to make an impression, however ridiculous that may seem to outstanders.

What topics are covered with the Trainings ? Technical ? Personality ?

If technical maybe you can make a story where distributed computing is integrated in your topics ? Or cloud ? You could then setup folding clients in the cloud and potentially expense those ...

Yes, that's the point. I do a lot of technical English in the manufacturing business. And there are a lot of IT-nerds there, too. So yes, I probably could sell that as an in-business approach. 1) preparing lessons with that kind of content as talking in English about IT issues is quite difficult for most Germans. That would help a lot because FAH covers lots of technical, yet for me as a teacher understandable, details. 2) on top of that I can use it as a marketing-gimmick like "Deutsche Bahn" with their we use 100% green energy - only - ever - marketing.