Hi everybody!

[williedee]

Hi ya'll, I've been a long time reader/listener of pcper's stuff, and just decided to start folding while I am in school. Of course, I had to join your team
I just have a few questions.
1. I feel like I should understand PPD better than I do. I know it stands for points per day, but where do those points show up? After about 5 days I only have 9,600 "points" listed on my account, even though I've been folding big SMP w/ a 4.2ghz 2500k. Is that because I haven't been using a passkey?
2. Is there any "community" hardware that we maintain? Like a 4-socket AMD board that people take turns hosting/donating money to.
Sorry for the questions, have a nice day!

[mmettin]

Hi Williedee !

Welcome to the team

after 10 Wu you will recieve the "bonus points" for your contribution if you are folding -bigadv units.

What kind of hardware are you folding with ?

[williedee]

I'm just folding on my 4 ghz i5 2500k and my 5770 (hey, as long as i have it :P ) So i've been doing big smps mostly.

[Activate: AMD]

I'm just folding on my 4 ghz i5 2500k and my 5770 (hey, as long as i have it :P ) So i've been doing big smps mostly.

I see you mentioned you aren't using a passkey. You must go ahead and set that up in order to start getting the real bonus points. Like mmettin says, you need 10 units in order to get the bonus, but those 10 units must be folded under the same passkey. Any units you folded prior to obtaining a passkey unfortunately don't count towards your 10. That 2500k should do pretty well on SMP units, so you should rack the 10 up pretty quickly.

As far as "ppd" goes, us regular folders tend to focus on numbers like that rather than all-out points most of the time. PPD is more useful for gauging your output over shorter time frames and allows you to compare yourself to other people who may have been folding for a lot longer than you. We always enjoy a little friendly competition and PPD is probably the best way to directly compare.

Another useful number is "PPD/watt", especially for those of us who have to pay our own electric bills. A GPU may be able to crank out 15,000 PPD, but will often do so with much higher power consumption than a high-end CPU. If all out points is your goal, damn the torpedoes, then using the GPU makes sense. For most of us, we like to balance our output with our power consumption so that we get the most bang for our electric-bill buck. Big 2P/4P rigs dominate from a PPD and PPD/w end, but are very expensive up front.

We used to run some community hardware under the "adopt-a-frog" banner. Those were typically rigs cobbled together from spare parts and donations, then farmed out to a lucky frog to fold under a unique username. I'd love to get some community giveaway type stuff going, but that would take some organization and some generous souls.

[williedee]

Thank you for clearing that up. I added my passkey about a day ago, so now I should be set to get those pesky bonus points
PPD/watt is certainly something to keep in mind, but for now I get 'unlimited' electricity in my dorm, so I'll just be a hog lol. Thanks again for clearing that up, I thought my setup producing unusually low points.
In regards to 'community' type stuff, I guess it makes sense that this group isn't really able to support it, as it does take a large amount of time and money, and members. Now if only AMD cards would chew through projects like nvidia...