EVGA Overtake

I've been wondering about that and when it would happen. With the change in BA folding and EVGA being a more GPU-heavy team, it almost seemed inevitable.
 
Yeah...I figured it would come down to this... It's discouraging to see so many abandon F@H because of the things going on at Stanford. Don't get me wrong, I can see where the frustation can take it's toll, but when it all boils down to it I thought it was about the SCIENCE and potential for helping humanity. :confused:

It used to be really fun and productive, but now it's almost like a burden to try and contribute. Maybe that's why everyone else is dropping the program and moving on to other things. Maybe I just need to pack up my 4P and get rid of it. I could use the extra money to pay down some bills anyway...

...anyone in the market any more for a SM H8QGI-F 4P with 6180SE's and a mild OC? ;)

Ax
 
Speaking as a person from the EVGA Team, I don't see much activity around taking advantage of the situation that we have all experienced with PG. There are several on our team too that have exited Folding and moved to Crunching (myself included).

I do see plenty of people that are not affected by the most recent happenings with PG as well. So, yes they will be continuing as usual and Folding just the same. I hafta guess that there are also those at [H] that will remain with Folding too. So, in that scenario there are still two large competitor, top Folding teams, just without some portion of the "enthusiast" Folding members. That is OK-fine and I know that every person has the right to pick where they want to live and play in DC-land. :D

For me, any takeover of HardOCP (under present conditions) would not be the kind of victory situation that I'd want to see. Rather, it would be a sad result from what has happened to "enthusiast-type" Folders via leadership actions at FAH. Maybe that will change someday and we can all pile back in, but I'm not holding my breath or looking back at this point. I truly enjoyed the old days when we were all Folding as hard as we could on both teams. Any changes in who holds top honors at EOC under current conditions will be a "ho-hum" for me. Competing with this great team for Crunching honors? Yeah, that would be fun and I'd love to play with ya on the battlefield! :cool:
 
jamsomito said:
I've been wondering about that and when it would happen. With the change in BA folding and EVGA being a more GPU-heavy team, it almost seemed inevitable.
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There's yet to be any change in BA. This is a result of [H] folders ceasing participation in the project.

texinga said:
Speaking as a person from the EVGA Team, I don't see much activity around taking advantage of the situation that we have all experienced with PG. There are several on our team too that have exited Folding and moved to Crunching (myself included).

I do see plenty of people that are not affected by the most recent happenings with PG as well. So, yes they will be continuing as usual and Folding just the same. I hafta guess that there are also those at [H] that will remain with Folding too. So, in that scenario there are still two large competitor, top Folding teams, just without some portion of the "enthusiast" Folding members. That is OK-fine and I know that every person has the right to pick where they want to live and play in DC-land. :D

For me, any takeover of HardOCP (under present conditions) would not be the kind of victory situation that I'd want to see. Rather, it would be a sad result from what has happened to "enthusiast-type" Folders via leadership actions at FAH. Maybe that will change someday and we can all pile back in, but I'm not holding my breath or looking back at this point. I truly enjoyed the old days when we were all Folding as hard as we could on both teams. Any changes in who holds top honors at EOC under current conditions will be a "ho-hum" for me. Competing with this great team for Crunching honors? Yeah, that would be fun and I'd love to play with ya on the battlefield! :cool:
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Pande has a long history of not giving a crap about the donors who make their project tick.

This is only the latest (and certainly not last) middle finger that PG and Stanford have dealt out. Many of the [H] crew remember all the other slights that came before.
 
Tex, thanks for the words, much appreciated. I had noticed the usual lack of joy at EVGA when the overtake showed up. Also the [H] crunching team is working hard so feel free to battle away

Skripka has a lot of valid points though, the finger has been waved too many times at us for some people and until PG change I don't see us being the powerhouse we were before. This is the second time that I have been flipped the bird and whilst I still contribute (and have just upgraded my 3rd rig) I do not involve myself as much as I used to. Once all the changes are in place next year we will have to see if PG still wants us as donors or not
 
Skripka, yep I wasn't there for every iteration of the things that have happened, but have been to a "couple of dances" with PG behavior. I actually think of the problem as more like "DDD" (Dissociative Donor Disorder). Hey we have acronyms for everything these days don't we? :D I truly believe that they are so disconnected from understanding their donor base, that they may as well have all actions and decisions made by zombies! :eek: So for me, it wasn't so much just the Bigadv thing, but the whole feeling of poor donor management that I felt. I'm "preachin' to the choir" for some here I know!
 
Nathan, I will continue to believe that HardOCP will be a challenging team no matter what form of DC you choose to follow. Of that I am confident and am also encouraged by. :cool:
 
Axdrenalin said:
Yeah...I figured it would come down to this... It's discouraging to see so many abandon F@H because of the things going on at Stanford. Don't get me wrong, I can see where the frustation can take it's toll, but when it all boils down to it I thought it was about the SCIENCE and potential for helping humanity. :confused:

It used to be really fun and productive, but now it's almost like a burden to try and contribute. Maybe that's why everyone else is dropping the program and moving on to other things. Maybe I just need to pack up my 4P and get rid of it. I could use the extra money to pay down some bills anyway...

...anyone in the market any more for a SM H8QGI-F 4P with 6180SE's and a mild OC? ;)

Ax
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They have yet to answer important questions. We haven't been told if our contributions are still helpful or if they are simply still running to please us.

Are we still contributing are are we wasting electricity.

If the paper has already been written then we are wasting our time, if it hasn't then we are still contributing.

But they haven't told us.

I will support F@H on GPUs but my BA rig will switch to BOINC in January.

They said "Thank you for past contributions" nothing abut current contributions.
 
The only paper published so far relates to 690x WU, the ones for 810x either need more research doing or are in the process of being written
 
Nathan, do you have any more in-depth knowledge of these matters, or are they as closed up about this to you as they are to the rest of the folding community?

Seems like all I'm getting any more is 810X units on my BA boxen. I've not gotten any standard SMP's for several days on my smaller boxen.
 
Just what's in the public domain, there was a post when the BA paper was released that it related to 6900/6901 - haven't seen anything else since and i'm not sure how long it takes to review the results data and write the paper.

As for your issue have you tried a reboot, I've had it sometimes where the client or rig has just stopped and won't do anything
 
Ya know... I've spent some time venting at PG and found it as fruitful as a woman with a hysterectomy.

I did enjoy our racing each other... I loved the pour it on attitude from both teams and I actually cheered when you guys took down us and Default because it was well in a word... cool.

I have no care in this matter any more regarding PG and our racing each other. I am however glad to meet you on a new battlefield.

Thanks folks... for everything, supporting us, supporting folding and now crunching. It's not about numbers perhaps as much any more for me but about actually feeling like I'm part of something big.
 
Spazturtle;1040641459]They have yet to answer important questions. We haven't been told if our contributions are still helpful or if they are simply still running to please us.
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I can answer this from conversations I have had with Vijay, yes your contributions are still very usefull and the points value is right for there value to Stanfords science

Are we still contributing are are we wasting electricity.
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You are not wasting elecricity

If the paper has already been written then we are wasting our time, if it hasn't then we are still contributing.
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According to VJ there has been many new areas opend up from the bigadv WU's and new projects started from the results already recieved, as near as I can tell from my conversations with him bigadv is the most accurate model simulation they have. At least to my understanding.



I have not quit folding because of the bigadv ending, I understand why it is ending, I have stopped my machines because of miss management of donors and the lack of respect shown towards donors at the Folding Forum which is part of Stanford. It is on Stanfords servers it is where PG comunicates with donors thus in my opinion Stanford supports the actions of the staff of the Folding Forum. We all know of the things that happen at the FF and Vijay has been made aware of it but he chose to do nothing about it and in that supports it. I can not in good concience support that, I believe we all should be treated with respect (I guess I am old school there).

I posted on the FF that for every rude comment or action I saw from the FF staff I would shut down a machine. The first thing they did was edit that out of the post. Then they locked the thread and banned mdk777, I do not believe he should be banned for asking for accountability. So 3 rigs went to boinc for those 3 actions. Over the next 2 weeks I saw 4 more rude comments to donors so the next 4 went to boinc needless to say since that day 7 - 4Ps 3 - 980X rigs and 3 - GTX680's have gone to boinc that is a total of 436 cores and 3 GPU's have been moved from F@H to boinc.

I still have hope for F@H that something will change, but untill I see better donor treatment at the FF, a PR program and better comunication, I can not in good concience support it.

I do have to say though that I have not seen any bad treatment of donors in the last week or so but I have not visited the FF much either in that time period.
 
I have to have my posts approved now because I wanted to post why I took my folders off line in the are there less folders now thread."
There was a fairly rude reply from tim today in that same thread. FF is PG's help forum and what ever is said there by the mods and admin. is a direct reflection on PG.'
tim may not be a mod any more but they approve of his posts and let him keep doing it.
The sad thin is we asked for better communication in the FF, and we get more info post on the blog about the science. That is a good thing, but that is not exactly what we meant.
They just shut down the communication they don't want to hear and make excuses why the numbers of cores go up and down.
GrandaPa was right as the only real way is to count the people folding, not TFLOPS and core count.
They should have a thread there at the FF "Who shut down or cut back on their folding?" to see how many really cut back. That will never happen.
.As someone posted, maybe it is time to move on, Let them screw those that stay.
It really is sad that it is like it is, what a great idea to find cures.
As luck would have it, they are not the only game in town.
 
so sad, I was going to make page 1 in the next several weeks

I could race up the stats now...be a "heavy hitter"...but it would feel so hollow

Folding was a big part of my identity, and I just can't get excited about it now, I feel used and betrayed
 
What I find interesting is that there is a lot of effort to buttress the thought that "all is well" via Flops count, etc. But nobody (including Vijay) over at the FF wants to look at the actual decline in Folding production that we all know to be happening on our teams. To me that is the old ostrich, head in the sand way of ignoring a problem, while the cheetah just took a swipe at your tail-feathers. :rolleyes:
 
Gilthanis said:
AgrFan pointed out this link from WCG: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=342

It's results like this that keep me interested in DC'ing. I'm glad it is from a more user friendly project. :)
Click to expand...

And because of this excellent article and the blog entry from the Chiba project, I'm shutting down my last F@H hosts and moving them to WCG. I was hoping to beat user "awachs" in F@H points, but what's the point? As jojo69 pointed out, it feels empty now. :(
 
I've been folding about 5 years, besides the inner satisfaction of doing something positive for my fellow man, the competition with you guys kept me motivated.
I'm so over trying to get excited about buying hardware when the feelings that Stanford could care less. I still fold once in a while since my grandmother passed from Alzheimer's but I've lost my passion.
I hope something changes so we can get excited again.
 
I've been doing this for fourteen years. Might be time to dig up one or two of the 'why we do this' threads.

This isn't the first, or last time Pande has irritated the donors. I can think of four episodes where everyone was going to take their marbles and go home. Every single time they change something, panties crumple into a wad.

I never expected my 4p's to go forever. I'll wait until I see the next iteration before I make any decisions.
As far as FF goes, I never paid much attention to it anyway.
 
dwdawg said:
This isn't the first, or last time Pande has irritated the donors. I can think of four episodes where everyone was going to take their marbles and go home. Every single time they change something, panties crumple into a wad.
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What are these four episodes? In the discussions over the BA changes/eventual cancellation, several people have mentioned something to the effect of "they do this over and over," but I haven't actually seen these events enumerated.

I've been with the project since 2007, and here's the controversial events I either saw firsthand or know about:

GPU1 being shut down with little warning, due to DirectX not producing valid results.
BA core minimum being raised from 8 to 16.
The recent BA brouhaha.

Are those three in your list of four? What event(s) am I missing? They've certainly shut down other clients/cores, such as PS3 or AMD core 11, but by the time those happened the hardware was rather out-of-date, so few people seemed to be upset that it was happening.
 
Grandpa_01 said:
I can answer this from conversations I have had with Vijay, yes your contributions are still very usefull and the points value is right for there value to Stanfords science


You are not wasting elecricity


According to VJ there has been many new areas opend up from the bigadv WU's and new projects started from the results already recieved, as near as I can tell from my conversations with him bigadv is the most accurate model simulation they have. At least to my understanding.
Click to expand...

Well that's a relief I guess.
 
When they fired up gromacs, people bitched about the tinkers points. When the fired up GPU's people bitched about points then. This is nothing new. Every time something changes, somebody feels crapped on. I got caught us in the BS one time, and switched half of my fleet to United Devices. Once UD ended, I switched back and vowed to stay out of the drama. Points are amusing, but not the reason I do this.



Zagen30 said:
What are these four episodes? In the discussions over the BA changes/eventual cancellation, several people have mentioned something to the effect of "they do this over and over," but I haven't actually seen these events enumerated.

I've been with the project since 2007, and here's the controversial events I either saw firsthand or know about:

GPU1 being shut down with little warning, due to DirectX not producing valid results.
BA core minimum being raised from 8 to 16.
The recent BA brouhaha.

Are those three in your list of four? What event(s) am I missing? They've certainly shut down other clients/cores, such as PS3 or AMD core 11, but by the time those happened the hardware was rather out-of-date, so few people seemed to be upset that it was happening.
Click to expand...
 
dwdawg said:
Points are amusing, but not the reason I do this.
Click to expand...

Exactly the reason we are all here, points are nice and all but not the end of the world. I've got wrapped up in the drama twice now and am have taken a more distanced view these last few weeks.

Besides - someone has to try and hold back EVGA:D
 
Zagen, do you remember the big flare up when many people bought video cards with 2 chips on each card, 9800GTX2 something or othe,r and PG sent out WUs that were cooking those cards?
People were dumping those WU and there were many people pissed, PG said oh well, lower your clocks and move more air. There are still posts over at EVGA about that.
That was not a good time for folding, many quit after buying thousands of dollars worth of those cards to have them burn up.
There were other thing that were going on with the FF and mods, so bad a few teams would not go there to post no matter what.
When they kill hardware, it maybe a bit old, but people bought that hardware with their hard earned money.
A 4P 24 core server is outdated? Really? I don't think so, they think people can just go out and buy an Intel 20/40 core/thread server cause it is new? I don't think so.
 
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Yes, the science, not the points, is the driving purpose

but censorship I will not abide

when they started throwing dissenting voices down the memory hole I was done
 
Bill1024 said:
Zagen, do you remember the big flare up when many people bought video cards with 2 chips on each card, 9800GTX2 something or othe,r and PG sent out WUs that were cooking those cards?
People were dumping those WU and there were many people pissed, PG said oh well, lower your clocks and move more air. There are still posts over at EVGA about that.
That was not a good time for folding, many quit after buying thousands of dollars worth of those cards to have them burn up.
There were other thing that were going on with the FF and mods, so bad a few teams would not go there to post no matter what.
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No, I don't remember that. I may have been folding since 2007, but I wasn't actively involved with the forums until mid-2008, and I probably wasn't paying much attention to GPU issues until mid-2009, when I finally bought a GPU that could actually fold a WU to completion. I didn't join a major team until a year ago, so I wouldn't have been exposed to mass frustration that way, either.

Bill1024 said:
When they kill hardware, it maybe a bit old, but people bought that hardware with their hard earned money.
A 4P 24 core server is outdated? Really? I don't think so, they think people can just go out and buy an Intel 20/40 core/thread server cause it is new? I don't think so.
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I'm going to set aside BA for a second, because I feel that's a separate issue from something like deprecating the 2000 and 3000 series AMD cards.

How long would you like them to keep supporting outdated hardware? I can't imagine any current or prospective researchers really want to start new projects on old cores when the new cores are better and faster. If no one wants to use the old hardware because the new stuff is exponentially better, what's your solution for providing work for the old stuff?

How many truly dedicated pieces of hardware are still running at the time of deprecation, and had been fully dedicated since initial purchase? It seems like a lot of dedicated hardware is replaced long before it becomes obsolete (again, not talking about BA). The old hardware still running at the time of deprecation seems to me to be more likely to be coming from people with aging gaming rigs that are still powerful enough to play the games the owners want, or used to be in gaming/rendering rigs and are moved to dedicated boxes once they become outdated for the owner's primary machine. Perhaps folding influenced that original purchasing decision, but I don't think it's fair to trot out the "hard-earned money" argument for hardware that was not purchased solely for folding. If you got sufficient gaming/rendering/other non-FAH value from your purchase, then it seems like it fulfilled its primary purpose, and any change in FAH status is secondary.

Switching back to BA, I had an email exchange with VJ a few weeks ago, and he admitted that a large part of the decision to end BA was that it had gotten out of control. They may have finally realized that giving this giant incentive for overly-specialized hardware with a very high cost of entry was untenable long-term, especially given how often they wanted to raise the bar. Any price point of Fermi/Kepler/Maxwell/Southern Islands/GCN/etc. can run core 17, so you don't have to drop $500 just to get in the door, and when that ends up going EOL in a few years, there will probably still be a decent resale market for them.
 
Zagen30 said:
What are these four episodes? In the discussions over the BA changes/eventual cancellation, several people have mentioned something to the effect of "they do this over and over," but I haven't actually seen these events enumerated.

I've been with the project since 2007, and here's the controversial events I either saw firsthand or know about:

GPU1 being shut down with little warning, due to DirectX not producing valid results.
BA core minimum being raised from 8 to 16.
The recent BA brouhaha.

Are those three in your list of four? What event(s) am I missing? They've certainly shut down other clients/cores, such as PS3 or AMD core 11, but by the time those happened the hardware was rather out-of-date, so few people seemed to be upset that it was happening.
Click to expand...


First thing I remember was PG zerod out everybody's points in the early day's although I do not remember ever seeing the reason for doing it. I was not active on he forums at that time.

Second thing I remember is the treatment of donors from the Folding Forum staff, pretty much the same behavior as today only a bit worse 7im was removed as a mod that time, several teams including [H] created a petition to have him removed, (I was not a member of [H] at that time but do remember the petitions from the teams. But as you can tell that did not change the way he treats people or is allowed to treat people by the Folding Forum staff. Nor has it changed the practice of editing threads and deleting post with no good reason other than mods directive.

Third thing I remember was the first change in the bigadv program from 8 to 16 cores

Fourth is recient event with bigadv and the continued poor treatment of donors at the Folding Forum by the remaining old line of staff and members.

All of these things could have been avoided with a little foresight (actually hindsight, I guess it is not 20/20), guidance and communication from PG, but from history repeating itself I would say it is pretty low on the importance scale, looks like it rates a 0 at this point in time.

There are other events but those are the major ones I remember
 
Man, I must be getting old. I forgot about them nuking the points :eek:
 
The bottom line is 1,2,3,4 times, how many is too many?
For me it has been too many times. Having to have my post approved because I wanted to say why I stopped folding. Can't make an announcement in the bigadv section about the change where it belonged in the first place. I built a 1300$ computer and a few months it was obsolete. Then I upgrade it to do BA and a couple months later again it is obsolete. I am done.
No one is stopping anyone from folding and there will people to come in to take the place of any one that stops.
I just hope those who have had enough, like myself, I ask them to consider BOINC crunching as a replacement. It is a more relaxed less stress form of DC and they are very thankful to their donors.
They keep people up on developments they show some class, respect and gratitude.
 
dwdawg said:
Man, I must be getting old. I forgot about them nuking the points :eek:
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When the F@H1 client was replaced by the F@H2 client PG zeroed everybody's points. I don't recall what the reason was. I lost all my points but compared to todays points it's pretty miniscule.

I'm sure that a lot of the old timers like myself started with G@H. PG ended that DC project because of funding issues I believe.

I'm pretty sure GPU1 was more of a proof of concept than anything else. I'm not aware of any actual research that resulted from it.
 
tank1023 said:
I've been folding about 5 years, besides the inner satisfaction of doing something positive for my fellow man, the competition with you guys kept me motivated.
I'm so over trying to get excited about buying hardware when the feelings that Stanford could care less. I still fold once in a while since my grandmother passed from Alzheimer's but I've lost my passion.
I hope something changes so we can get excited again.
Click to expand...

I got to agree with you all, It's just sucked the life out of me for Folding.. First time I've check the forums in weeks. Maybe its time to unionize and organize a boycott for sometime period..

Maybe that happening, and I missed it in the forum..Lol.
 
tank1023 said:
I've been folding about 5 years, besides the inner satisfaction of doing something positive for my fellow man, the competition with you guys kept me motivated.
I'm so over trying to get excited about buying hardware when the feelings that Stanford could care less. I still fold once in a while since my grandmother passed from Alzheimer's but I've lost my passion.
I hope something changes so we can get excited again.
Click to expand...



I know that feel. I'm going to cut down folding in half once I overtake the #1 spot on my current team which is in weeks. From then on out I'll probably decide whether to return back to my old home (Guru3D) or become a permanent HardOCP folder now that I've got used to this community on my last remaining GPU and work on getting EVGA bucks.

Every year or two of folding I am reminded why I kept taking long breaks. The people working for Stanford just don't seem nearly as motivated as the community is. Just in the past 6 years I've repeated this process 3 times. You can only donate your hardware for a free number in return for so long before you realize you're nothing more than re-used toilet paper to them.
 
Well, we have had a lot of fun passing EVGA, will be fun watching them pass us again.

The main point of all this is the science, and it looks like most if not all our lost F@H participants have moved to other good projects, and I'm 110% happy about that.
 
W.Feather said:
Don't forget the nuking of bigadv points after 6901....
Click to expand...

That one I can not really blame PG for, although I can blame them for not paying attention to detail. A folding brother from another team built an Identical benchmark machine to Stanford's he confirmed that the points were wrong on bigadv and many many other WU's, apparently Stanford's benchmark machine was mis configured or something and had been for quite a while.

Amazingly it was shortly after he took the time and went to the expense to build his machine that Stanford fixed theirs. But they should have figured it out long before they did. And they did not learn anything from it, they still do not have a a second machine to verify their benchmarking before releasing. But at least now they do listen to the beta testers from time to time about their benchmarking.
 
I turned all mine off and have no desire to turn them back on.
 
Grandpa_01 said:
That one I can not really blame PG for, although I can blame them for not paying attention to detail. A folding brother from another team built an Identical benchmark machine to Stanford's he confirmed that the points were wrong on bigadv and many many other WU's, apparently Stanford's benchmark machine was mis configured or something and had been for quite a while.

Amazingly it was shortly after he took the time and went to the expense to build his machine that Stanford fixed theirs. But they should have figured it out long before they did. And they did not learn anything from it, they still do not have a a second machine to verify their benchmarking before releasing. But at least now they do listen to the beta testers from time to time about their benchmarking.
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With thousands folding and a bunch of beta testers, How many beta I do not know. But why can't they ask people list your systems and run these WUs report the TPF and PPD. Why do they even need their own bench computer? Can't they make a spread sheet with all that info and come up with good point values?
During this BA mess I was in PM with a mod, I gave him my system specks, MB,CPU count, core count and speed,memory speed and TPF and PPD
They Just have to ask, and they would get all the help they needed.
Communication!!!!!!!!!
 
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