Folding Forum

How does one know if one's hardware for F@H is getting too out-of-date?

I currently have an AMD Ryzen 7 and a Radeon RX570 video card, but at what point is that no longer sufficient?

Is there a way to tell? I don't want to waste electricity if (for example) there are no work units to process.

P.S. Yes, I know I've got some time before I have to worry about this. But I'm very much a "fire & forget" person when it comes to my F@H client. But with Bitcoin and other silliness, I know that prices for video cards, etc are going up. However, I don't plan on upgrading my hardware for awhile yet.

Will I see idle activity in the logs? I am just wondering.

You are far from obsolescence with an RX 580. If I had to point an inefficiency with your system would be the high power draw of your cards architecture.
Apart from that, you were, are and will be helping science for a long time to come.

Well of course. I just meant that I have a habit of going two to three years and suddenly deciding "I should upgrade!". Or I drool over the latest articles over the newest [AMD] whatever and I think "well, my processor is fine, but..."

This really was more of an idle question as I've noticed you guys will eek out as much life as you can from older hardware.

Well, you could follow my example: I'm hoping/waiting for a crypto crash and then it's grabbing time on the second hand market. That is my upgrade path.

The easy way to check is to go to this page, enter your F@H user name, and see if "Got bonus" is "1": https://apps.foldingathome.org/cpu

If you're not getting the bonus, you either don't have a passkey, or your WUs are being returned after "Timeout", but before "Expiry" which means it might be time to tune your setup or stop folding with it.

momus_98 wrote:I've noticed you guys will eek out as much life as you can from older hardware.

Any new generation hardware will eek out more work per KWH so the cost of electricity will ultimately be the deciding factor. I don't pay for electricity so I keep using old hardware and gradually add newer hardware.

The real exception to that statement is the pre-release version of a Cell Phone client. (It's NOT ready for release ) The fact is that the performance will never meet the deadlines associated with current WUs so some kind of work restructuring would be required which so far is probably not achievable.

As far as nVidia GPUs is concerned (for the current assignments) Fermi class WUs are too old. Any x86 CPU that doesn't support SSE2 is too old. (I can't give you good information for AMD GPUs.) I'd call Intel GPU and ARM chips unsupported which might be the same as "too old" as they really aren't up to the job. The performance of a lot of GPUs and CPUs is approaching "too old" so I wouldn't spend any money on them.

As far as CPUs are concerned, many newer WUs will not be assigned to CPUs with nCPUs < 4:

I have recently retired my SSE2 Core Duo laptops, they were only doing 1k PPD.

The Gen 3 Intel Core i3. i5, i7, i9 and AMD Zen CPUs can do AVX2 which is the 'best' CPU algorithm. (Zen2 is faster than Zen 1 or Zen+)

AMD GPU Terascale 2 and Terascale 3 are about useless, I suspect CGN 1.0 is soon obsolete.

Nvidia GPUs Tesla is too old, Fermi has issues, Kepler and any thing newer is fine. [edited, see below]

If you want I could get dates, but those are the names

JimboPalmer wrote:Nvidia GPUs Tesla is too old, Kepler has issues, any thing newer is fine.

I would just modify this to:

Nvidia GPUs Tesla is too old, Fermi has issues, Kepler and any thing newer is fine.

The low end cards of AMD and nVidia also can be below the range needed to complete WUs within timeouts. Their integrated GPUs (iGPUs) can vary was well. Just the most recent and more powerful iGPUs are effectively useful.

The iGPUs from Intel are being looked at to see if they can be used effectively.

Thanks everyone. I was just idly browsing Ars Technica and Gizmodo reviews of AMD/Radeon gear (I won't touch Intel, but that's for another day) and I always think "well, I could fold more..."

Then reality sets in and I remind myself I don't have the money. But still it's nice to dream

As for electricity use: I live alone. I work nights, so my client works while I do & sleeps while I do (too much heat during the day; my box is powered off). The exception is we are in the cooler months still, so it's been mostly 24/7 right now, but that will change as it gets warm.

I just know that over time one's hardware isn't as fast as it used to be and maybe the folding isn't as quick as it once was, so a person gets the upgrade itch. I did not know about that link posted by gunnarre. Thanks!

And thanks again for the replies. I won't be upgrading for awhile.