The 12th Annual Folding@Home Holiday Season Race

[Howdy]

That makes sense. If I had a basement I would certainly be putting a rig or two down there to more evenly heat the place.

As it is, I'm consistently around 80F inside +/- 3 degrees unless it's in the single digits or below.

Oh there are machines down there, they run great due to low temps- holding OC steady and actually allowing to be set higher. They just can't (unfortunately) generate enough heat to keep the temps up higher.

 

[StefanR5R]

My rooms are at 80 ±3 °F too, though I had to keep windows open frequently lately. I'm glad that I have a reliable and convenient anti-freeze mode of the heating (which never went on this entire season so far).

 

[TennesseeTony]

It is rare here in TN for the temperature to be below freezing for days on end. I usually have too much heat (last two years), but even firing up another 1000 watts of R9-280X for Milkyway, I've had to turn on (low or medium setting) a small space heater in the bedroom at night. My mid-November to mid-December power bill was very mild, I'm hoping mid-Dec to mid-January's bill is mild as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I'm usually moderately warm in New England, throughout the winter, running my 5+ rigs with GPUs, doing DC during Dec, and now, doing some hashing from Jan-Apr, hopefully enough to pay off my recent hardware purchases, but the last week or two, it's been brutally cold here, single-digits F, or below zero at times.

 

[Howdy]

This is the forecast for my weekend, Sunday is looking like there will be a heat wave coming though!!

Northern IL


Tonight
Clear, with a low around -18. Wind chill values as low as -31. Northwest wind around 5 mph.
Saturday
Sunny and cold, with a high near 8. Wind chill values as low as -31. Northwest wind around 5 mph becoming south in the afternoon.
Saturday Night
Increasing clouds, with a temperature rising to around 12 by 5am. Wind chill values as low as -12. South wind 5 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph.
Sunday
A 50 percent chance of snow. Cloudy, with a high near 29. Wind chill values as low as -1. South southwest wind 10 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph.
Sunday Night
A 40 percent chance of snow, mainly before midnight. Cloudy, with a low around 25. South southwest wind 5 to 10 mph becoming west after midnight.

 

[Talifan9]

We were at 4f with a windchill of around -20. I can't imagine how -31 feels
At least its a good excuse to keep FAH running at full speed to warm the house!

 

[petrusbroder]

Here are the stats for the 36nd day of the race in Folding@Home with Brony@Home
Stats are as of January 6, 2018, 20.20 UTC (approx).
The inter-team race stats are from the Folding@Home stats page, and from EOC.com.

Today it seems that there is a change of the trend for the past four days. But we need to continue to fold. The Brony@Home team has still a solid chance of catching us ... if they recruit and upgrade. They may also be bunkering results ...

 

[FinalplayerRyu]

Today it seems that there is a change of the trend for the past four days. But we need to continue to fold. The Brony@Home team has still a solid chance of catching us ... if they recruit and upgrade. They may also be bunkering results ...

I am pretty sure we at Brony@Home are already beat, you guys won...

So relax, take a chill pill. No need to pick up the effort >.>

 

[Orange Kid]

I am pretty sure we at Brony@Home are already beat, you guys won...

So relax, take a chill pill. No need to pick up the effort >.>

Be careful. It may be the old Trojan Brony pony trick.

 

[Talifan9]

Be careful. It may be the old Trojan Brony pony trick.

Neigh
But as long as there is science done...~

 

[Pokey]

This is the best FAH race we have had in a long time, maybe ever.

I have my dead motherboard replaced so I expect to see a jump back up in production. Yet another rabbit hole gone down. This time all hardware related. The replacement had a crippled PCIe-16x slot that did not work. Bios update corrected it, but who ships a MB with a slot that does not work in the first place??? (Asus is the correct answer) But all is good now. Compared to some of the problems I see here mine are mild.

 

[Talifan9]

This is the best FAH race we have had in a long time, maybe ever.

I have my dead motherboard replaced so I expect to see a jump back up in production. Yet another rabbit hole gone down. This time all hardware related. The replacement had a crippled PCIe-16x slot that did not work. Bios update corrected it, but who ships a MB with a slot that does not work in the first place??? (Asus is the correct answer) But all is good now. Compared to some of the problems I see here mine are mild.

I was going to say, that sounds a lot like Asus. They sent me a refurb board missing the VRM heatsinks first, then when I finally got them to agree to another swap a month later they sent one missing the CPU retention bracket. Like...the entire thing.
Never buying an Asus board again

 

[crashtech]

Wow, Asus used to be the flagship of motherboard vendors. I've been liking ASRock for the last several years, though. Ironically, ASRock used to be Asus' cheap brand.

 

[indydude345]

I have much faith in ASRock boards, all of the ones I've had have been very reliable. My X370 Taichi is a beast, and I don't think I'll ever get rid of it, thanks to @crashtech.

 

[Pokey]

Well in all fairness, the motherboard that failed was an ASRock. My oldest currently working board is a Gigabyte running a quad core put in service on or about 3/2009. And I have three other ASRocks, and two Asus boards now. So quite the potpourri.................. (price does play a part in the selection process but not necessarily the deciding factor)

 

[StefanR5R]

They may also be bunkering results ...

I presume that nobody does that purposely, as one would lose the quick return bonus this way. And the "unintentional bunkering" due to the F@H-internal site-to-site transfer problem between November and December 12 has not returned. I can see this by my own credit history whenever I have my larger CPU slots engaged. (Currently I have two CPU servers at F@H. They make up a small but identifiable portion of my daily production.)

 

[TennesseeTony]

My 2P board that died was a $390 ASRock. Which replaced a DOA ASRock of the same model. Which (sort of) replaced a $500 X99 workstation ASUS board that ran for a whole 28 days.

 

[StefanR5R]

welcome to the first ever weekly stats (of 2018) for Distributed Computing!

Folding@Home overall position - 19
TeAm total for the week - 354,048,491
TeAm rank for weekly production - 7

New folders in the TeAm during the past week: greaterscope and rrunswickjr.
Welcome and thank you!

 

[UsandThem]

Ok. I signed up and played around with the downloadable client, but running anything other than light increased my PC's fan noise too much for my liking on anything medium and above (GPU and CPU). I'm going to try running inside Chrome on medium, and see how it goes since this version only seems to use the CPU. With this version, my CPU temps stay under 50c, while with the client it was 60c.

With the downloadable client, my PC was pulling about 300w on medium, and I didn't mind the heat because it's cold, but home office is usually quiet, and my fans were noticeably louder. If this Chrome folding works good for a few days, I could even put it on my kid's PCs upstairs.

I'm giving it a shot right now....

 

[Ken g6]

Welcome, @UsandThem! Unfortunately, CPU folding produces insignificant results compared to GPU folding. The most power-efficient way to fold is with GPU only. But I guess that's too loud for you? You can set the regular client to use only the CPU or GPU by deleting the slot you don't want in the advanced control.

Does the Chrome client let you join our team? Does it let you enter your account key too?

 

[UsandThem]

Welcome, @UsandThem! Unfortunately, CPU folding produces insignificant results compared to GPU folding. The most power-efficient way to fold is with GPU only. But I guess that's too loud for you?

Does the Chrome client let you join our team? Does it let you enter your account key too?

Yeah, I entered the team number and received a pass key. I guess yesterday as I was playing around with it, it shows I earned 200 points for the Anandtech team.

I guess I might have to look at the downloadable client again. When I moved the slider to medium, it was pegging my CPU at 100% and my GPU pretty good as well. With the CPU only (light), I was between 160-170w. When I moved the slider to medium, it went to 290-300w, and really caused all my fans to increase pretty dramatically. I guess I am sensitive to sound, as I use Noctua fans so I don't hear them at all while working in my home office.

If I wasn't in my office and let it run, it wouldn't be an issue. Maybe I can figure out how to use only my GPU for folding, and start the desktop client when I am done working and not in the room. Not to mention, for some reason the web results wouldn't connect and work after I restarted my PC last night. Every time I opened it from the desktop app, it would just state "attempting to connect" over and over. If I manually opened the site in Firefox and Edge, it connected fine and showed my current status. Not sure what happened there?

 

[crashtech]

Welcome @UsandThem ! By default, the F@H app tries to use the web interface, but you can right-click on the notification area to use the Advanced Control. Most of us use that since it exposes many more control options, also most of us remove the CPU slot in "Configure."

It may also be possible for you to use an app like Afterburner to create a custom fan profile for your GPU to mitigate noise.

 

[UsandThem]

Welcome @UsandThem ! By default, the F@H app tries to use the web interface, but you can right-click on the notification area to use the Advanced Control. Most of us use that since it exposes many more control options, also most of us remove the CPU slot in "Configure."

It may also be possible for you to use an app like Afterburner to create a custom fan profile for your GPU to mitigate noise.

I'll take a look at it again at the settings and see what I can do.

I use Afterburner already since instead of having my GPU fan turn off while under 60c, I have it run pretty much at 20% (which I can't hear at all) unless I am gaming, and then it goes up at a more steady rate instead of ramping up really fast to counter the heat.

 

[TennesseeTony]

If you downloaded and installed, you will find the icon in the notification bar, you can right click that.....and crash has already posted while I typed.

And he covered the points I was going to cover....advanced control, then "Configure" then "Slots" then add the GPU (sounds like it's there already though) if needed, and perhaps remove the CPU to eliminate one noise source (the points from CPU pale in comparison to GPU anyway).

I certainly am bothered by the GPU fans going up and down, but a steady state fan quickly gets tuned out. So MSI Afterburner configured to manually set the fan speed (on a curve of your choosing) certainly helps with that.

 

[UsandThem]

Also, what kind points per day would I get using my GPU (GTX 1070) instead of my CPU (which is currently showing an estimated 12,200 doing it on medium in Chrome)?