Folding Forum

Hello guys,
I'm new to folding and the current hardware I'm using is an 8 core Opteron 6128HE, I do use this machine as my home server, though with very little load usually so I decided to use the computing power for folding. Now occasionally there are some usage on the machine and therefore folding must stop for 1-2 hours a day, all the other times it is folding on full power on 7 cores, but I find that impossible to meet the timeout limit of just 4 days, so is my CPU too crap for folding? If so is there any possible solution other than upgrading hardware. Helps are appreciated.

Welcome to the folding support forum.

Your 6128 HE while a powerful chip when released over a decade ago does have some limitations when used for folding now. First is that it is old enough that its calculations are limited to SSE. They do provide a CPU folding core for SSE, but much of the benchmarking is based on AVX capable hardware now.

Second is the HE version of the Opteron is power limited to a lower TDP than the standard processor series. That will throttle processing over time.

What you can do to avoid some of the larger projects with tighter timeout periods is to set the machine to fold on 4 cores instead of 8. These projects are set to only be assigned to systems requesting WUs that specify a CPU thread count that is greater than 4. See if that gives your server projects that can complete within the timeouts.