Folding Forum

I’m new to folding. I’m running it on an older quad core CPU MacBook Pro. I’m trying to figure out if it’s better to do one slot with all four cores, two slots with two cores or four slots with one core each. I started with four cores in one slot but the cpu was only running around 25 percent. I then went fully the other way and did one core per slot and maximized the cpu at 100 percent. Is this the preferred method? This machine is only being used for folding so I want the cpu to run at full capacity.

Best is to use just one slot with as many CPU cores assigned to it as you want.

The first WU running on one core is due to a bug in the installer, it sometimes set the request for the first WU to just be for one core, and then that can not be increased to more. Later WU's will run at up to the number of CPU threads set at the time they were requested and downloaded.

If you have more than one WU still running. What I would recommend is setting the slots to Finish. Once all but one slot has finished, delete the extra slots and set the remains one to use as many cores as you want. You may find that will be 4, or 3 might leave more CPU for the rest of the system and the WU running will have a thread interrupted less often and run quicker.

usually one slot with 4 cores is better, set the slider to full and leave it to run and it should put all the cores under load though. just keep an eye on temps, F@H will push the hardware hard and cooling in laptops isn't great to begin with

Thank you both for your replies. The bug with the first one only using one core must have been what I saw, I just was too impatient to see what would happen. Since only one slot was being used I deleted the other ones and put all four CPU’s on that slot. Thank you again.