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Donating CPU power haha

I just thought it was good to tell people about on a forum of people with hex-cores and high overclocks, could help a lot.
 
It's a great thing to do, but don't you guys get massive electric bills with your computers going flat out all the time? Also surly it's going to shorten the life of your computers? but I guess if your an enthusiast you upgrade so frequently that that's unlikely to become an issue :D
 
Trofeo said:
It's a great thing to do, but don't you guys get massive electric bills with your computers going flat out all the time? Also surly it's going to shorten the life of your computers? but I guess if your an enthusiast you upgrade so frequently that that's unlikely to become an issue :D
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I have a 500Watt power supply, not overly worrying, also my Dad pays the bills. I'll tell him of his good work :P.

If I wear out a part, it's just an excuse to upgrade :)
 
Well just warning you, did it for one month and it doubled the electric bills. My mum wasn't very happy with it at all...
 
I did it for a couple months, years back, then realised how utterly worthless it was.

For every million hours of stuff people were doing 5 years ago, a cpu in 20 years will do the same work in minutes, using far less oil/coal generated electricity, basically its worthless.

Can't help but think the vast vast vast vast majority of power being used for these things is utterly wasted and the sheer number of people that do this, all day long, every day, for a decade, on a dozen crap old computers or 5 new ones with high power gpu's. Meh.

Maybe I'm wrong but, so many of these things started over a decade ago and, I've not seen any "it was all worth it, seti/folding/something did something useful, finally" threads.

People just like to compete, its nuts, "we collectively have more cpu power than you do, woooo".
 
When it all started it did make sense. The intention was to use spare processing power while computers would be switched on anyway. The original client I used was actually a screen saver so it only kicked in when the computer was idle.

This was before most of the CPU energy saving features were introduced so the power consumption was more-or-less the same irrespective of the CPU load.

It was also back when energy prices were a fraction of what they are now and nobody really worried very much about how much they were consuming.

As it was originally intended it was almost a zero cost option.
 
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LeJosh said:
I thought work was done on the GPU nowadays?
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It doesn't matter how the work is done.

When it all started the computers involved were going to use almost exactly the same energy whether they were switched on and folding or switched on and idle. Assuming you didn't deliberately leave them on just to do folding there wasn't a cost.

With modern kit with all the available energy saving features there's always going to be an additional cost incurred.
 
Well it does because CPUs draw very little today but GPUs draw quite a bit of power at full load but render a lot faster than any CPU ever will...
 
bremen1874 said:
When it all started it did make sense. The intention was to use spare processing power while computers would be switched on anyway. The original client I used was actually a screen saver so it only kicked in when the computer was idle.

This was before most of the CPU energy saving features were introduced so the power consumption was more-or-less the same irrespective of the CPU load.

It was also back when energy prices were a fraction of what they are now and nobody really worried very much about how much they were consuming.

As it was originally intended it was almost a zero cost option.
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Good post.

I've been doing folding, and more recently BOINC (CPDN, SETI, rosetta etc.) for several years. If a machine draws an extra 100 watts (say) at full load over idle, that'll cost you about an extra £110 a year (30p a day).

GPUs draw more power but get a few times more "work per watt". They do cost quite a bit to run, but then they get an awful lot of science done compared to CPUs.

I enjoy it. I mostly use my own machine and it's on 24/7 a lot of the year. My electricity comes from ecotricity (mostly renewable) so I don't feel guilty. It's more of an invetment in science (searching for extra-terrestrials, modelling the climate, and designing anti-alzheimers drugs), and renewable leccie.
 
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