A short folding story

Pezui · October 20, 2020

Hello, I started back when Covid first really got bad in the United States. I was watching an LTT video and I saw the call out for folding and I remembered years ago being involved with the initial effort in late 2000 early 2001. So I thought to myself sure I can donate some spare computer cycles. But much had changed in my life during the 20 years of the folding project existing, now I was a senior staff engineer for my company making good money and swimming in spare hardware. So I tried to toss an entire C7000 HPE Cluster at it with 14 BL460c blades and 28 Intel Xeon E5-2690v4 CPU's (784 threads @2.6GHZ). About the time I got the whole thing setup I realized getting a workload for a CPU was... just not going to happen. CPU workloads were all gobbled up, the hypervisor was having a bad day trying to pipe all of the queues at once which were all just waiting around, the power was expensive at 15,900 watts peak, and in the first month I think I had like 11 work units. So I abandoned that project and went about just using a tiny desktop I had that was a little power house I used in a side gig since it had a video card in it and those could at least get a work unit assigned.

Fast forward 7ish months and I finally have surpassed 500M points and earned my platinum badge, which is mostly why I am making this post, its a badge lets see if it looks good right? Anyways it is now time to upgrade my little toy machine and I have a kind of crazy new machine here but not assembled yet (Below). Though I am sure many of you have something better or would recommend different hardware etc. With all of this, I wanted to say thank you for encouraging me to do something with the race car I built to help others. Being inspired enough to take an action is kind of rare these days. While I don't catch many of the video's LTT does, and I might not own the merchandise, at least I can stand back and be part of something that is trying to do good for others. I hope good deeds continue to be what the channel and brand are known for, more than just PCMR fan boy flexing.

The machine in my picture is the current box that did most of the folding for the past 7 months, it got so warm the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M front panel warps out until it doesn't have a folding job for more than half an hour then it loudly pops back in to place. I guess the 10900x at 5.2 and the 2080 at 1940... well it has been stable but real warm. Also everyone asks, yes the tubes are straight but the lighting and parallax oddity makes funky camera shots look warped. I posted the machine to PCMR, I think I got 2 likes, posted it to Corsair and it won a build of the month prize. Strange how the audience will shift that much.

The machine parts list below once assembled will probably fold 85% of its life away, but it might as well look good doing it so we have all of the lights. The last 15% of the time I use it for a very specific side job.

Phanteks Enthoo Elite

Intel 10900x

Intel 10900KF

Asus Prime X299 - Deluxe II

Asus ROG Strix z490-I

160GB of Corsair 3400 in white with Blinky lights

3 Samsung 970 EVO Plus drives

2 MSI Ventus 2080's

1 unknown video card for the ROG board... could some one sell me a damn founders edition 3080?

Corsair AX1200i

Corsair RM850

6 HP Envy 27" 4k Monitors

1 Asus DRW-24b3ST... yes a DVD drive is part of my work, don't be envious.

about $3k worth of Corsair Hydro X parts to water cool both systems in the same case

NineEyeRon · October 20, 2020

My short folding story:

I folded when I got free electric from solar panels over the summer,

Now it’s autumn I don’t.

RollinLower · October 20, 2020

nice build, looks like it'll be brighter than your monitor with al the RGB stuff on.

what are you planning to do with this machine, other than folding?

Pezui · October 20, 2020

1 minute ago, RollinLower said:

nice build, looks like it'll be brighter than your monitor with al the RGB stuff on.

what are you planning to do with this machine, other than folding?

I have some specific industry work that I run at times as a side gig. That doesn't scale past 10 cores, at all... so this rebuild I am trying the second PC in the same chassis so I can strap the 10900KF and 10900X together and see which can execute the work fastest. I hope I can get a really high overclock out of the KF, it has just been sitting at stock speed under a 10700 stock cooler for 2 months now waiting for the rest of the parts to arrive. I don't want to water cool the second machine without a video card, but we know how buying an Nvidia card is going right now so who knows how long this might take.