Back again?

[poddo]

Hey guys. Saw something about folding and logged back in to see how my borgs had been doing, and decided to start up again. Its been a while and I'm just curious what the state of the program is like nowadays. From what I've been reading it seems like most people that are serious about it have abandoned the CPU client in favor of the GPU, which really sucks for those on a budget.

For the horde!

 

[Shlomo]

Hey guys. Saw something about folding and logged back in to see how my borgs had been doing, and decided to start up again. Its been a while and I'm just curious what the state of the program is like nowadays. From what I've been reading it seems like most people that are serious about it have abandoned the CPU client in favor of the GPU, which really sucks for those on a budget.

For the horde!

Yeah borging doesn't carry the same power it used to now. It is all about dedicated farms to be honest. You can't just go out and borg 50 or so P4's and be pushing top notch points anymore, and SMP clients are just to unstable to borg on peoples machines. So you can get some PPD from borging home computers with the single core client, but don't expect much. The real points are from dedicated GPU and CPU farms since SMP clients can push some good points on VM quads and i7's.

To be fair though, it IS cheaper to build a good GPU farm than a CPU farm now though since you can get 4-5 cards on a single motherboard folding. So 1 proc, 1 mobo, 2 gigs o ram, and then throw in 5 GPU's and you're set, and there are some great budget folders out there like the 9800gt/8800gt, the 8800gs, ect that you can throw 5 in a boxen and get 20,000 PPD

 

[Kendrak]

Nothing wrong with running CPU.

The GPU is nice because it is very easy to set up, you can get 3K+ out of a 40 buck card.

To really have the CPU keep up with GPU preformance, a quad with 2x VMs running linux client is the only way to go.

For most people a 40 buck card is just easier, with a lot less software setup.

 

[tkam]

For best PPD the GPU client and the Linux SMP client are your best bet. The windows smp client in its current state is unreliable at best.

 

[Axdrenalin]

For best PPD the GPU client and the Linux SMP client are your best bet. The windows smp client in its current state is unreliable at best.

Couldn't have said it better myself. All my SMP based boxen are linux.

I wish they would develop a GPU client for Linux, but I'd say the NVidia CUDA package is the limiting factor there..

 

[lassiterb]

Couldn't have said it better myself. All my SMP based boxen are linux.

I wish they would develop a GPU client for Linux, but I'd say the NVidia CUDA package is the limiting factor there..

The GPU client works rather well under linux using wine and is fairly easy to setup. Follow this guide and its a snap.