Folding Forum

I have a spare office style desktop that I built for coding on, and obviously I wanted to have it fold while I'm not coding on it. It has an ATI Radeon HD 4550 GPU (Gigabyte card with no fans, uses passive cooling from the airflow within the case). I have it on the newest drivers available, the 2D driver is 8.01.01.1248, the 3D driver is 7.14.10.0911, the BIOS is from 2009 and is version 011.022.007.004. The graphics card has 512MB of GDDR3, with a slight OC on the core clock and memory clock of an additional 20mhz on both the core and memory clocks when in 'high performance' settings.

Has anyone else gotten an ATI Radeon HD 4550 to work with Folding at Home? I understand that this is a 12-year-old GPU that wasn't made for 3D gaming, and the Folding at Home software uses the 3D graphics function of a GPU

The HD 4000 series have been blacklisted for folding ever since the first of the current GPU folding cores based on OpenCL were released. There was a brief period under an older core where it was usable, then AMD deprecated the programming resources used in favor of OpenCL, but that was about 10 years ago.

Welcome to Folding@Home!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F ... ores#GPU_2

Core_11 ran on ATI graphic cards supporting Brook, an early API for computing on GPUs. F@H gave up on Brook and embraced OpenCL in Core_16.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrookGPU

It is a very weak card that does not support OpenCL 1.2 or Double Precision floating point math, both prerequisites to folding in Core_21 or Core_22.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/r ... -4550.c232

It is about 17 times slower than the cheapest current graphics card the GT 1030.

(While I dis it as too slow to fold, you cannot out type the graphics!)

Regrettably it won't GPU fold … but you might try a CPU slot - which even running on all cores shouldn't impact your coding as it will be on low priority … It might not be fast but you may find you can complete WUs before the expiry deadline (it probably won't make the Timeout, which is the point at which the WU is released to another folder) but it might be worth a try if you want to.

Okay! Thank you. I might be able to code with the CPU folding, but it is older (predictable with the GPU I have, lol). It's an AMD Athlon II X4 640, with 4 core, 4 threads, but I don't code 24/7 as I'm an amateur coder. When I'm not coding I use my gaming laptop for, predicably, gaming.

OPCG_SpartanGolf6 wrote:...I understand that this is a 12-year-old GPU that wasn't made for 3D gaming, and the Folding at Home software uses the 3D graphics function of a GPU

Please note that F@H doesn't heavily use the "rendering" components of the GPU, instead it uses the compute function of the GPUs. In other words, folding requires OpenCL while games require OpenGL code.

OPCG_SpartanGolf6 wrote:...It's an AMD Athlon II X4 640, with 4 core, 4 threads, but I don't code 24/7 as I'm an amateur coder. When I'm not coding I use my gaming laptop for, predicably, gaming.

If you choose to fold using 4 CPUs, it would be fine assuming you run that system 24/7. However, if you fold for few hours a day, please keep on eye on the the Timeout data since it would be preferred that you finish the assigned WU by before that date.

Regarding your laptop, you can fold on the CPU too and even adjust the number of threads to ensure that the heat/noise levels are acceptable to you.

If you need further help, please post your log file: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=26036