I got bored running all day+ for 150-250 points and getting passed up by others way too fast using my old Northwood Pentium OC’s to 3.5. So I stopped folding for most of last year and this year.
Then made the mistake of walking into my local Fry’s last month to ‘browse’. Yea, I walked out with a E8400 Core-2 Duo, 9600GT, and Gigabyte MB. First thing I did was overclock it to 3.6g. I had to use a lot more voltage then other’s I’ve read about, so I must have a lower grade E8400. Anyway, read about how the SMP client rocks. I tried to install the SMP client on XP and had problems...No patients, so ditched that effort.
So last week I decommissioned an old PC of he kids and had an extra SATA. So I installed Ubuntu and gave the SMP client another whirl.. WOW! My CPU cranks through a SMP WU in 1/2-3/4 of a day and they’re worth about 1780 a pop!
The only problem is most of my daily stuff... and games :) ... is on XP. So I only boot up to Ubunto for folding when I am not using the PC. But still.. I go to bed and boot up Ubunto, kick off a fold.. and wake up the next morning to a nice little 1700+ point bump before booting back up to XP. Cool!
I installed F@H onto an E8x00 today. It was running the F@H GUI at about 4 minutes per 1%. Wow. You might want to consider the console version for an additional 500 ppd.
I am running console versions almost entirely with a single GPU system. Almost all are older systems.
Honestly, I could get more points by buying a new PS3 and running it nonstop, but I really want to get some research done on the broad scale that Windows console allows.
Now if I can convince the Budget Committee that this new AMD 4800 needs an upgrade ...
I kinda wish that