Ideas please regarding bang for the buck. Opinions on the most Folding cpu power for the money. I'm happy with what I've got (iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz), but as this F@H bug has bitten fairly hard I'm wondering what's faster and cheap as my next step. OS fairly independent as I've got a fresh Xmas XP SP2 disk, ISOs of Fedora 6 for 32 and 64 bit, and OS X comes on Macs. Actually, I left Windows for Macs because Linux and OS X are so much nicer to use. Quiet and cool would really help me sell "She who must be obeyed."

The second point is the power requirements. Tree hugger that I am, we buy 300KW/month of wind power. Also summer in Utah can be hot and the cooling bill is brutal, oh and did I say quiet is important too? If my screen is off then the iMac uses 64 watts, so 1536 watts in 24 hours. Right now averaging 965 PPD. The watts/PPD = 1536/965 = 1.6 watts per point. Can I beat that?

I think that I've got a couple of converts yesterday to Folding@home over coffee and leftover Christmas cakes; but many people are sensitive to spending any extra $. 24/7 folding's increase in their monthly power bill could easily be offset by a few compact fluorescent bulbs. For me, it will be about $7/month to fold 24/7.

Which way to go? Cheap water cooled OC'd Pentium 805 in a beater box and use a hot tub as the heat sink? Nah. A Via Mini ITX sipping power and taking forever to finish a WU? Nah. Another iMac? Nah, I don't need another screen. A Xeon 3000 series 1.6 GHz (based on the same Merom core that my iMac is using) in a 1U server box? A Mac Pro would beat the living daylights out of my iMac and by the time it dropped out of warranty Quad Core Xeons would be cheap. eBay beckons... g'night

Have you considered GPU's or a PS3? They produce a higher point per day than just about any CPU out there.

I'll have to expand my net to include these two. There is one team member in Team Pande Lab (1) way down at the bottom with 373 WUs named 'PS3', probably testing. Never found a PPD figure for the PS3 yet. I wonder if Pande Group is so excited about the PS3s because of massive performance or its potential ubiquity. The whole point of F@H is to use millions of distributed and relatively slow cpus versus a few thousand in a single super computer. I wonder if they'll release a PS3 client with the switch to the v6.0 client? Some rumors have it that Sony will wait until they ramp up production some more and release the PS3 in Europe in March with a new firmware upgrade. PS3 would be nice for me as Fedora has been ported and installed. Hmmm only $600, and at reportedly 120 watts it would need to pull about 1800 PPD to beat the Core 2 Duo iMac's which it should do handily. Shucks, it was fun letting myself be seduced by the idea of a Mac Pro.

(Damn, just had to type this again. Swapped laptop batteries after carefully turning on the charger and then forgot to plug it in.)

GPU performance is still foreign to me and I need to go look the numbers. It would mean a new motherboard, cpu and PSU, as my Abit, Althon is 6 years old and won't take the PCIx16 GPU cards. It was the first ATA 100 motherboard in town back then. PS3 probably wins the $/PPD test.

{{Off topic Gerg: I took the Freeman's Oath in 1969 in Middlebury. Where in VT are you?}}

Right near St. Albans which is way up north a stones throw from Canada.

They'd be a nice upgrade to a PC, but expensive to buy just to fold with.

I went over to http://gpu.fahinfo.org/ and checked out their historical highs (2711, 2723, 2725, 2730) and then entered a project number (2723) just to see what was up. The ATI Radeon 1950XTX [$364] has run ~500-900 PPD and the 1900XT [$376] runs ~650-860 PPD. The prices are just quicky lookups, Newegg, TigerDirect and just the top sponsored link of a Google search.

Motherboard, CPU (Tiger bundle $300), new Power Supply ($30-50) and it would be ~$800 all together. The CPU could be folding too, so maybe 1,200 PPD. Not for me, I've made the PC -> Mac switch; but may pop for a PS3 once I see how they fold.

Anyone have a favorite UPS? I lost power last night. The WU recovered until I screwed up trying to load Fedora Core 6 with VMware and ended up digging through the snow to a shed to get the OS X boot disks out to recover. Lost 16% of a 15 hour WU.

You are one lucky bum to have snow. Snow is the "economy" up here in Vermont and I'm on the Nordic ski team. Right now it is 55 degrees F and we haven't had snow since before Christmas.

On topic now you should consider yourself lucky that you only lost 16% of a 15 hour work unit. I lost two 6 day work units that were between 70% and 50% done. As a result I have yet to return a work unit from this computer in over a week.

That's nothing, i was 98% done with one that had taken me 2 weeks and my computer decided to vomit.

Yo, Gerg. Are you Nordic Combined? I was for 5 years in New Hampshire and then went to too many parties to be a competitive skier when I got to Middlebury in 1967. Stopped skiing several years ago here, though waist deep powder at Alta is almost better than sex, too many orthopedic injuries to continue. Not much snow here either. Check out the Mountain Cams Picture of the Day at http://www.alta.com/index.php

Back to Folding@home. New bang for the buck idea. Do it the easy way, get somebody else to do it. We've got a really good local ISP here, Xmission.com, they host mirrrors for Fedora Core and host Speedtest.net, etc. I wonder how much they'd charge me for running a process during their slack hours at the lowest priority? The base website account there is like $10 for 5 GB transfer. They charge $10/month for a shell account. I wonder how much they'd charge to run Linux F@H client as cron job at the lowest priority from 12 AM to 6AM or even 24/7? I'll ask them. At $10/month that's 5 years work for the price of a PS3 60GB and it could be a tax write off.

No we're not Nordic Combined. The nearest ski jumping facility is at Lake Placid at the old Olympic venue.

Back on track I would be very interested to see how that plays out for you and what kind of theoretical ppd you could achieve.