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AWOOGA!! MaxPC are back on our threat list! AWOOGA!!

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Background:
Working with the team stats a few years back, our number of active folders was about 640. Now we're hovering just over 300 hundred (310 atm).

No matter how successful our team is at farming, we can't rely on a few super productive folders (ChasR, HayesK, SFU, Ned, etc.), to move our team away from the likes of TSC! Russia with their 800+ members. We need more actively folding teammates, and we aren't getting them.

We need to partner up with some (perhaps several), manufacturers and/or distributors, of PC gear. EVGA, Overclockers.net, even Hardware Canucks, have done this, all with great success.

Overclocking.com is a great name, but overclocking information is available (even on OCF), quite apart from Folding@Home. We don't get a lot of new folders, because they came here looking for overclocking help.

We need something that will attract new members, and there's nothing as successful as special or discounted prices on new gear. I know Gregorian chanting *seems* like it would attract hordes of FAH enthusiasts, but so far, it hasn't worked. :rofl:

What companies we make arrangements with, what those arrangements will be, and how they'll be implemented, are important details, for later. First, we need to decide whether we want to pursue this, or not. IMO, we either have to move forward with it, or accept becoming a team fighting to stay even, but ultimately on the decline.

I see the excitement that is so evident on the "new gear" teams, when the newest discounted or special gear offer rolls out onto their forum. We need that kind of excitement, to attract and maintain new members. FAH will always be about the cure, but new folders have a choice of thousands of FAH teams. Whether we like it or not, we are in competition for those new members. They are likely to only join one team. Right now, we're not being competitive with the best teams, in recruiting/attracting the new members we need.

Comments most welcome.

So which company shall we sell ourselves out to. I personally use quite a few MSI boards and vid cards as well as ASUS. Got a couple ASROCK to boot. Only half-kidding about this, though. We really do need to do something to draw in new folders.

EVGA has grown HUGE because of the way they sponsor their folks. You can earn 10 EVGA bucks a month for 250k of production which can be used to purchase stuff from their website. That's $120 worth of gear a year, which is a decent mobo. They also have "rig" competitions, with $1000 a month prizes. There are some ridiculously nice and expensive systems out there, that can put up some nice PPD. Especially the SR-2's.

Max PC has the name recognition and the following.

OCN has the $275/month drawings and sponsors??

HardForum has a core group of "server" folders, which attracts those high PPD folders. They all compete with each other and support each other. OMG, their top 3 folders put out more than our entire team. (The new 6903 and 6904's give some ridiculous PPD on multi-processor machines.)

I've personally being toying with the idea of putting up a website about my folding and putting a link for donations to support the cause.

Anybody here got friends or associates in the computer industry that could hook us up.

Also we might consider doing a sister website just dedicated to folding. Call overclockfolding.com or extremefolding.com or something along those lines.
 
I agree with tuigi69, the team needs to be more visible. It being deep in the OC Forums with no real front page of its own makes it easy to skip over. More OC'ers need to know this pushes your rig for stability testing and it all goes for a good cause.

How many members does OCF actually have?
 
I agree with tuigi69, the team needs to be more visible. It being deep in the OC Forums with no real front page of its own makes it easy to skip over. More OC'ers need to know this pushes your rig for stability testing and it all goes for a good cause.

How many members does OCF actually have?

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=32
7688 members so far, and currently less than 300 active. We have the highest average daily team PPD / active member count, though.
 
So which company shall we sell ourselves out to. I personally use quite a few MSI boards and vid cards as well as ASUS. Got a couple ASROCK to boot. Only half-kidding about this, though. We really do need to do something to draw in new folders.

Reminds me of the elitist "pure as the driven snow" attitude of the amateur athletic movement. (aka the Olympics, prior to 1980's).

I don't think of it as "selling out", I think of it as affiliated with, or sponsored by. If the sports teams can do it, and other folding teams have shown it can work, why not try it?

Or we could just do nothing and wait until our team has less than 100 members, and ranked #20. At that point, we probably couldn't get a partial sponsor, if we tried.

I really like our new forum make-over, and the icons, too. We have a reliable and quick service (imo). We just do not have the key we need to increase our team numbers, yet.

I'll be back folding with FAH in about a week, (with a million points in SETI and Rosetta, too), but production will be very limited because of the Summer heat wave we're having in southern CA. Not a lot of folding help there, unfortunately.
 
I have a new Q9550 doing -smp 4 folding, and have switched the i7 930 on my web server from -smp 8 to -bigadv.
 
coming back...

it's been a while... I know. :p

a few questions if I may (didn't want to start a new thread, so pardon my hijack :D ):

Do NV cards still reign supreme?
Can I fold with HD6970s (inbound) or should I return them for something else?
 
Do NV cards still reign supreme?
Can I fold with HD6970s (inbound) or should I return them for something else?

Good to see ya around WP !! :)

For folding right now, 2600K is king.........(For most of us anyway)

If your referring to gpu folding only.....Yes Nvidia is still the top producer

The 6970's will fold though. Return them if ya want :shrug:
 
Welcome back, Wicked Pixie

The pendulum has swung over to favor cpu folding, particularly with i7's folding the new -bigadv (big advanced), wu's. (And they really are big). Many of us don't fold with gpu's at all anymore, since the gain is offset largely by the loss of points from the slowdown caused by gpu folding.

Not to mention the extra power, heat and noise of gpu folding.

More projects now use a sliding time sensitive scale, so a quicker return means substantially more points.

Wonderful to see you back, WP!
 
Awww, thanks cuda :grouphug:

I had to google what a 2600K was. lol I'm really out of touch. :p
Read a bit @ folding forum and I got lost... really fast...

I'm just starting w/ 2 rigs:

1st one would be running an old X5650 and HD6970 in CF.
The GPUs might have to go to SETI if it doesn't fold well or I might just exchange it
after I play with it awhile. ;)

Last I heard in bigadv, having an SSD helps a lot. Is that still the case?

What's the RAM requirement for running bigadv via VM?



2nd rig is just a i7-930. Haven't decided on a GPU yet? Any good recommendations for performance/watt NV GPU?
 
Oh hey Adak! :salute:

Well, in that case, I will just stick with CF in my main rig and fold/crunch whatever project benefits from it the most. :)

Oh, and I can stick an old card on my 2nd one. :p
 
Don't feel bad i just had to google what a X5650 was. :p

As far as bigadv being helped by SSD :shrug: Can't help ya there i'm still an SSD virgin. :D

You should be able to get away with 4Gb ram running bigadv in VM, but as is always the case, more is always better......

I'm out of the loop as far as gpu folding goes.....Not much help to ya.
 
I don't have an SSD, but doubt they're all that useful. What IS important is, if you use Linux, do NOT use the ext4 file system! (use ext3 instead). With ext4, write times for data change from some bigadv wu's, change from just a half dozen seconds, to an hour or more!!

Is that insane or what?
 
Don't feel bad i just had to google what a X5650 was. :p

As far as bigadv being helped by SSD :shrug: Can't help ya there i'm still an SSD virgin. :D

You should be able to get away with 4Gb ram running bigadv in VM, but as is always the case, more is always better......

I'm out of the loop as far as gpu folding goes.....Not much help to ya.
Well, here's my 930 setup @ 3 GB's RAM. It's not even getting close to hitting the swap file.

As to an SSD, I have a 40GB but I can't use it ATM as it's just too small for my main machine. I'm going to transplant it to my dedicated 2600K folder and we'll see what happens after a couple of weeks of folding.

With all the volatility now with bigadv, I want it to settle down first before making any judgements.
 

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Welcome back WP.

The bigadv wu only require ~1.1 Gb ram, ~1.4GB total used by VM, but mine are set at 2.5GB just in case something bigger comes along. Be sure to use ext3 file system to avoid delay writing to disk at end of bigadv wu. Most of my dedicated folders are CPU only, running native Ubuntu 11.04. Have a few older rigs running windows GPU client and Ubuntu 10.04 VM CPU clients. The VMs running regular SMP client are set at 1GB, but only using ~350MB.
 
@ HayesK & Adak


Wait guys... hold on now. You mean to tell me I bought an SSD for nothing. :eek:
I could've sworn before I left, I read threads with people reporting
faster read/write on SSDs - anywhere from 30min - an hr. That was just
an ext. 3 thing? Holy crap! I missed the memo on that one. :p

Note to self: Read/ask before buying stuff... and do not open the damn box. Just return it.
 
We've got ext4 now, ext3 is so last year... :p

What filesystem are you comparing ext3 to, where the other filesystem causes delays?

Guess you are not running bigadv, else you would be aware of the problem with ext4 causing extra long delay at the end of bigadv wu, which is not experienced on ext3 or ntfs. Apparently SSD drives are fast enough to overcome the ext4 delayed write issue. Plenty of info out there in OCF and elsewhere...
 
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