Folding Forum

I've been using the desktop application a bit recently, but I did look at the browser version before. In the browser version, there's a small tooltip with the following information

Folding power controls how much of your computer's resources Folding@home uses.
If you want to see what your high performance system can do crank it up to Full.
If your computer starts to stress out move it to Light to give it a break.
These settings have the following meaning:
Light 20%
Medium 60%
Full 100%
Actual usage will be less than these values and depends on how many CPU cores your system has available and what other processes are running on your computer at the time.

I'll reiterate that I'm using the desktop app version, and that version does not contain this tooltip, but my assumption was that it would work the same. I have a program that reads my cpu usage, temperature, and ram, among other things. When I'm not running Folding@home, my cpu usage is <5%. When I set it to Medium, my cpu usage jumps all the way up to 80%, and temperature starts rising dramatically, even above 70 degrees Celsius, which is actually dangerous for my cpu. I had hoped that I would be able to run it at Light while I'm using the computer and Medium when I'm away, but Medium is not safe. At this point, I thought "Oh well, I should still be able to use Light, right?" Well, I tried setting it to Light, and usage went all the way up to 55%, and stayed around there, with temperature going up to about 60 degrees. This is too significant a load to be able to use while also doing anything else remotely stressful. I don't even want to know what would happen if I turned it on to Full.


tl;dr i can only run it at light when i'm not busy

Welcome to the folding support forum.

The slider settings for the regular client translate as follows:

Full - uses all CPU cores for CPU folding minus one reserved for each GPU if you are also folding on your GPU
Medium - uses one less core than Full for CPU folding
Light - uses half your CPU cores

As for CPU usage, the processes used for the folding client are set to the lowest priority. So they will be scheduled last after other processes have been given what CPU time they require.

You might consider upgrading your cpu cooler. Before I did my pc was crashing from the cpu overheating at around 80C. Now it runs around 50C. My other two rigs I set them up that way from the beginning.

TomJackal wrote:When I'm not running Folding@home, my cpu usage is <5%. When I set it to Medium, my cpu usage jumps all the way up to 80%, and temperature starts rising dramatically, even above 70 degrees Celsius, which is actually dangerous for my cpu. I had hoped that I would be able to run it at Light while I'm using the computer and Medium when I'm away, but Medium is not safe. At this point, I thought "Oh well, I should still be able to use Light, right?" Well, I tried setting it to Light, and usage went all the way up to 55%, and stayed around there, with temperature going up to about 60 degrees. This is too significant a load to be able to use while also doing anything else remotely stressful.

You didn't tell us any details about your machine. Some CPUs (e.g., 4th-gen i7 like my 4770K) run happily at 70C+ for extended time periods.

As for CPU load, what other work do you do, and how much constant load does that put on the CPU?

However, you may want to look into your cooling if you are going to Fold. First step is to open the case and clean out all the dust. This is difficult with many laptops, but even then you may be able to get to a significant portion of it by removing the keyboard (relatively easy on my old Lenovos). Then you should assess your cooling setup. How many case fans, what size, blowing in or out? Do the intake fans have dust filters? Do you have room to add more case fans? CPU, GPU, and PSU fans?