Join the SatelliteGuys Folding@Home Team!

[KE4EST]

Yeah that number sounds about right for two 970's, if you folded 24/7.

BTW Welcome or should I say Welcome Back to the folding team and thanks for helping out!!

 

[EatMyVolts]

As long as you have decent cooling, you should be able to run 24/7 without problems. Sounds like a nice folding rig. I keep meaning to get another 970, ad I see how you do it may accelerate the process (just don't tell Mrs Volts).

 

[king3pj]

As long as you have decent cooling, you should be able to run 24/7 without problems. Sounds like a nice folding rig. I keep meaning to get another 970, ad I see how you do it may accelerate the process (just don't tell Mrs Volts).

Yeah, my temperatures have been holding steady around 70 degrees on each GPU so they are well within the safe range. I also read that it wasn't really any worse for them to stay warmed up all the time than it is to make them go through the heating and cooling fluctuations that happen in normal use and shutdown.

I'm still hesitant to run 24/7 due to energy use though. I found a thread on another forum that had people claiming their electric bills rose anywhere from $30 to $70 when they started folding. I know the 970 is supposed to be energy efficient at 148W TDP but still, running 2 of them at full load in addition to my other PC components could add up.

I'm environmentally conscious, both for my own wallet's sake and partially for the actual environment. The utility costs for my house are quite a bit below the norm because I make an effort to keep them that way. I pay a smoothed rate so I get the same price every month based on the averages for my actual energy costs. My electricity and natural gas together are only $83 per month so an increase of $30+ would be significant.

Right now I'm leaning towards letting my PC fold when it would normally be on anyways and let it go into sleep mode the rest of the day just like I do now. I would love to fold 24/7 and contribute as much as possible but I'm not a fan of that kind of energy increase.

 

[Foxbat]

You could look at it this way: It's cold in most places at this time of the year. By Folding, you can use the waste heat to heat your home instead of other sources of heat.

 

[king3pj]

You could look at it this way: It's cold in most places at this time of the year. By Folding, you can use the waste heat to heat your home instead of other sources of heat.

I suppose that is one way to look at it. This PC definitely kicks out the heat when I'm gaming. That should only increase when folding.

 

[EatMyVolts]

You got me wondering what this is costing me so I plugged my ups into a kill-a-watt and found I'm drawing 344 watts.

Z170 motherboard
I5/6600K cpu
Nvidia 970
250 gb ssd
1 tb internal and 2 tb external hdd's
22 " monitor (which I do turn off when I'm not using it which drops the draw to 290 watts)

So let's calculate:
344 watts * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = 248 kwh/month.
248 kwh/month * 0.12 $/kwh = $30 / month. Slightly more than it takes to keep Mrs Volts' car charged.
Is is worth it? To me it is, to you ??? At any rate welcome back to the fold.

 

[king3pj]

Well I just checked out my stats page and it looks like I completed a few WUs today. My signature still shows me as inactive though. I guess I'll have to look into seeing what I did wrong when I have more time to tinker.

 

[KE4EST]

Well I just checked out my stats page and it looks like I completed a few WUs today. My signature still shows me as inactive though. I guess I'll have to look into seeing what I did wrong when I have more time to tinker.

Nothing you did wrong with the signature, it is cached and don't how Scott has it set to refresh right now, maybe every 24hrs??

 

[KE4EST]

I see you.

 

[king3pj]

My personal stats page shows slightly more than that at 232,659 points but either way it's nice to be moving up the list.

 

[KE4EST]

The stats I posted from over at extremeoverclocking are updated every 3 hours or so. Your personal page is updated much quicker.

 

[king3pj]

I'm really enjoying the folding process. It's surprisingly entertaining to watch those points add up. If I had one complaint it would be that the program seems to completely ignore my preference for which disease I want my computer to work on.

The reason I started folding in the first place was because I wanted to contribute to Parkinson's research in honor of my dad. Every single WU I have gotten has been cancer related. Don't get me wrong, I am totally behind cancer research as well. The fact that they give you a choice on which disease you want to fight just feels a little misleading if the system is going to ignore that choice.

 

[EatMyVolts]

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but they are not doing much on Parkinson's right now http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-diseases/#ntoc5 and haven't for a few years. Your preference is just that, if they have any that match up, you'll get 'em first. If they don't you get whatever.

I've had close experiences with that disease, it's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy. But then, neither is the big C.

 

[king3pj]

Unfortunately that takes away a lot of the enthusiasm I had for the project. Like I said before, I totally support cancer research so I will continue to fold but the reason I joined up was to contribute to Parkinson's research.

 

[Stargazer]

I wondered how I was doing compared to others. My computer is not caring well and my computer has been running hard a lot. It must be using the CPU and not my graphics card or something.

 

[EatMyVolts]

What video card do you have? Are you using a passkey? Your points do look like you only using the CPU.

 

[Voyager6]

Just six days until we zip past the Overclockers.UA. SatGuys still has a chance to crack the Top 100 by New Years Day.

 

[Voyager6]

We also have some milestones to acknowledge.

Congrats to smasho for reaching 80 Million points.
Congrats to ke4est for reaching 30 Million points.
Congrats to king3pj for reaching 700K points.
Congrats to windtamer for reaching 100K points.

 

[Stargazer]

I have the GFORCE GT 620 Graphics card.

 

[king3pj]

Maybe it's because you have it set to only when idle. I originally tried to do it that way so it wouldn't interrupt my gaming but I saw that my GPUs almost never decided my PC was idle enough to start folding. Now I have it set to "while working" and I just have to pause it when I want to play a game. Otherwise I get terrible framerates in my games.

I also see that you have your CPU set to use 6 cores while folding. How many cores does your CPU have? I have a quad core processor and when I tried to let my CPU fold too all 4 cores stayed locked at 100% usage even though I was only folding on 2 cores.

I ended up disabling the CPU folding because the points were minuscule compared to the GPUs and I thought it may be having trouble providing both GPUs with data efficiently if it was always at 100% usage. I definitely don't want to slow my 970s down to get 1200 points per WU out of my CPU.