Folding Forum

Hi i have two pcs at my house atm, and my good 1 is burning through the WUs, but is it worth me running Folding@home on it.
its a p2 300mhz with mmx, 384mb ram and a nvidia vanta lt 8mb, running xp home.
well if it can do things that arnt as demanded as the things that are important then it should be ok, right?

If that processor has SSE capabilites, it should finish work units before the deadlines. If the work units are not completed before the deadline for that work unit, no points are credited.

well its got mmx tech but not sse, but would it still finish it before the dealine?

SSE was introduced with P3 ... so your P2 is in my opinion too old to fold

so its not even worth running it at all?
if thats the case i would upgrade it so it can, does it make a diffrence if the cpu finishes folding before the due date?

Regan wrote:so its not even worth running it at all?
if thats the case i would upgrade it so it can, does it make a diffrence if the cpu finishes folding before the due date?

No. Please upgrade if you can. If you miss the deadline, the fah client will delete the work unit, and download a new work unit. No points, and nothing is contributed to the project. That is not worth it.

so ideally i used it as a home server, what would be useful for fah and my home,
like pc spec wise but it needs to be low budget tho, i have a good amount of sd ram, so ideally i need a mb and cpu, how fast does the p3 hav to be to keep up with the work?

The slowest P3 is 450 MHz. Those will make the deadlines easily.

so ideally any cpu would du with sse instruction support?

Regan wrote:so ideally any cpu would du with sse instruction support?

7im wrote:If that processor has SSE capabilites, it should finish work units before the deadlines.

Yes. The faster the better.

Nowadays you may as well get the cheapest dual core you can find. Intel preferably, but AMD if not.

Then overclock it a bit.

End spec should be something like this.

Intel/AMD Dual Core CPU (2GHz should be a bare minimum to look for)
A Motherboard
1GB Ram
Anything else you need

yea i might do that, i could pick all that up for about 220-400 anyway

My slowest machine is a 1GHz first-gen Athlon. It's running 3DNow on it's current WU. Gotta love that old hardware.

Regan wrote:so its not even worth running it at all?

IMHO, something that old should be upgraded to a new CPU that'll use less power.

Regan wrote:if thats the case i would upgrade it so it can, does it make a diffrence if the cpu finishes folding before the due date?

Faster is always better as the WUs are based on earlier results.

yea tru but i havnt yet frozen it, its the setup that has a huge heatsink that u dont need a fan running 2 keep it cold, even wen its under full load
it dusnt use as much power as ma m8s core 2 duo 2.0ghz, but hey its a goodie, its a refuge station setup apart from the 256 stick of sd