Folding@Home News 12th November - 19th November 2010

Nice tiffe BS :D

KERCHING!
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#1 Don't fold if you can't afford it mate, its not worth it. IT and we will still be around for you when you can get back in the saddle.

#2 What hardware do you have? If you have an 4 core i7 with HT it will definitely be worthwhile you ditching the power hungry gfx cards and just crunch bigadv's for 30-35K PPD with pretty low power usage in comparison.
 
Ok so im putting together a bigadv rig, mainly because when seti comes back online most of the cycles now folding will be moved away and its a good opportunity to replace my desktop.
Also dont want to massively increase my power envelope with even more GPU's.

I have a few questions.

1. How sensitive is folding to ram timing?

2. How much memory would you recommend per core/thread?

3. Will SSD hard drive/s make any difference(better/worse) when crunching?
 
1. Not very, if your overclock is stable should be fine.

2. It varies on the type and size of WU, but I have no problem with 6GB Tri-Channel for an i7 and 3/4 GPUs.

3. Honestly I'd never recommend using an SSD while folding, would be a quick way to reduce its lifespan. Get yourself a cheap traditional HDD and slave it.
 
Thanks for that.
My build seems to have kit coming from all over the globe,its not going to be beautiful like Biffa's ,think more brutal:)
Beans on toast from now till the summer :(
 
1. I'm running 9,9,9,24,1T on my main rig, faster with looser timings and 1T than tighter timings and 2T, I'd say bigadv is more sensitive to memory stability than normal A3 Wu's
2. bigadv uses no more than 2GB on windows, so 6GB is fine
3. SSD = no point, use it as a boot drive if you are using the machine for something else, I have my folding folders on a slave SATA drive.
 
BaBa said:
3. Will SSD hard drive/s make any difference(better/worse) when crunching?
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Nah. Some people think it does, but honestly I don't really see it. A 100MHz clock speed increase is probably 100 times more effective than storage speed!

Speed said:
3. Honestly I'd never recommend using an SSD while folding, would be a quick way to reduce its lifespan. Get yourself a cheap traditional HDD and slave it.
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My Intel is rated at 5 years with VERY heavy usage. Wearing out SSDs is a complete myth. Windows and other applications probably write just as much to disk as folding@home clients. I am not worried about it in the slightest, nor should anyone else.

Biffa said:
1. I'm running 9,9,9,24,1T on my main rig, faster with looser timings and 1T than tighter timings and 2T, I'd say bigadv is more sensitive to memory stability than normal A3 Wu's
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I read that the actual speed of RAM is more important than the speed of the CPU. In that if you had slow RAM and fast CPU it would probably perform worse than a computer with slow CPU and fast RAM.

Slow and Fast being relative terms! I am not suggesting an i3 would be better than a Xeon if it had faster RAM! :p
 
SiriusB said:
My Intel is rated at 5 years with VERY heavy usage. Wearing out SSDs is a complete myth. Windows and other applications probably write just as much to disk as folding@home clients. I am not worried about it in the slightest, nor should anyone else.
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I'm afraid not, SSDs especially the early models were very prone to decreased performance that couldn't be restored with an erase, so it isn't a myth. Your SSD may be rated for 5 years of standard desktop use, but the amount of writes that Folding does is much higher than any normal use.

It is too early to know for certain, but considering how cheap low energy high performance traditional hard drives have become, it really isn't worth the risk. Especially when cell wear isn't covered by any companies warranty.
 
Thanks again guys, i think i may get an ssd boot drive as it will be my main desktop.
One last question , how well does it scale beyond 12 threads?
 
SiriusB said:
I read that the actual speed of RAM is more important than the speed of the CPU. In that if you had slow RAM and fast CPU it would probably perform worse than a computer with slow CPU and fast RAM.

Slow and Fast being relative terms! I am not suggesting an i3 would be better than a Xeon if it had faster RAM! :p
Click to expand...

In my experience it just has to be balanced but stable when it comes to RAM, I don't see any point going higher than PC3-12800 1600Mhz memory.
 
Speed said:
I'm afraid not, SSDs especially the early models were very prone to decreased performance that couldn't be restored with an erase, so it isn't a myth. Your SSD may be rated for 5 years of standard desktop use, but the amount of writes that Folding does is much higher than any normal use.

It is too early to know for certain, but considering how cheap low energy high performance traditional hard drives have become, it really isn't worth the risk. Especially when cell wear isn't covered by any companies warranty.
Click to expand...

Intel's 5 years is based on 100GB of writes a day. Your average desktop doesn't write nearly that much, let alone F@H. I regularly transfer 100s of GBs, but I don't come close to 100GB per day every day.

I am not denying SSDs have a limited life-span. But they are more robust than many people realise. Like I said, I am not in the least bit worried about it! :p
 
Oooh, I decided to give bigadv a shot earlier. Started folding at 1700, so far I am on 10% at 2230. 32 minutes per frame on a 6900. 33.8K PPD! :D

I need to work out if my day to day desktop usage will have a big impact on that or not. I know gaming will, but I tended to switch off the client when folding standard SMP WUs.
 
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