Well thats it I am gutted I have just had the electric bill in and to cut a long story short I have doubled my electric use my bill is £840 It is costing me over a fiver a day just for the folding rigs. I know that does not sound a lot but that around £150 a month and I just have not got that sort of money so the rigs are off as from now. I may have some 460's for sale soon after the shock wares off that is. I just started to feel I was making a bit of a contribution but I cannot go on sorry all
Sorry to hear that Kerno , hopefully you'll be able to continue in some form, even if just to help people out on the forum.
Yes, GPU folding can be very expensive, even if you factor-in money 'saved' on the heating bill. I only run my GPUs for special occasions these days, and sometimes just for maintenance. I hope you'll come back for the Chimps Challenge.
Sorry to hear that kerno, you have made a valuable contribution to the team and hopefully to the science.
I have to say there are a lot of people stopping these days because of "shockingly high" electricity bills... do people not have a good grasp on the concept that computers which are using 100% resources 24/7 are using a lot of units? I know it's expensive and some cannot afford to run their equipment all the time, some dedicated folders are slowing down or stopping altogether - that much I understand and have no problem with - it's the fact they apparently don't monitor their usage and don't realise how much it's costing them until the bill comes in, at which point it's too late - that has me a bit miffed. Remember, running a dedicated folding rig is the equivalent of running a car out of gear with a brick on the throttle, held to the floor. It's going to run out of fuel pretty fast... much faster than it would if you were popping out for a 2 or 3 mile drive - which would be comparable to what using the same computer to surf the web or perform office tasks for a couple of hours would cost on electricity units.
Folding ... it can be an expensive 'hobby'!! Some of our team are lucky enough to be able to house their rigs at work and so don't pay for the 'juice' they use - for those of us who actually foot the bill, then it can be a considerable cost (on top of the hardware costs), and it is understandable in the current economic climate to look at reducing costs. In my case, I have power meters on all 9 of my rigs, so I know how much each is pulling from the wall, and I keep tabs on the leccy bill as well (I've been Folding for over 5 years, so I've got a handle on what costs are like). Perhaps these points may help those who want to Fold, but find the juice bill is too high; 1. GPU's suck the most juice - either reduce the number of these Folding or only use those cards that give a good PPD/watt. 2. If you can run a bigadv WU, then this is the best use of the CPU, otherwise the SMP, if not, the single client is helpful to F@H, but not that great for your PPD/watt (though they are looking at ammending the bonus scheme to include these). CPU's tend to use less power than GPU's - highend CPU's are 130W, most others (not including mobile CPU's) are 95W - OC'ing tends to increase the consumption. 3. Get a power meter to see how changing the hardware, or OC'ing, changes the power useage. 4. When you add new hardware, do it piece-meal, so that you can see the impact on the costs when the next bill comes through. 5. When looking at supplier (if you are the home owner), for heavy Folding, the secondary electricity tarriff is usually the cost you want to home-in on, as this will swamp other costs.
Good advice Doc, like you I have power meter on each folding machine and monitor the consumption/cost daily. No nasty surprises that way.
Sorry to hear you're dropping out of the team mate but I understand your position. My last leccy bill was up £150 due to folding. Hopefully you'll be able to return to the team in the future.
Thanks for all the comments, and I agree I was a bit stupid not looking into the true cost of this. I have a meter that I have been using and know the draw what I didnt know was how much each kw/h unit cost until the misses opened the bill To say I am off the team is an understatement Anyway for the time being i am going to hold on to my motherboards and CPU's but i am going to shift on the GPU's I have 3 X 460 GTX 786MB (had 4 but using one as a PhysX card) 2 older 9800GX2's and 3 X 9600GS0's 2 at 786MB the other at 384 (fast one) up for grabs the 2 XFA 460's are around a month old the Inno3d card around 3 months. I am open to offers for the GS0's and the older 9800GX2's but the 460's I would like a min of £80 + postage which should be around a fiver. I will be putting these on ebay but would like them to go to a good folding home so I hope I will not get wrong for posting this hear. Thanks again and I will be back in the future (when I get to reconfigure the firewall at work ) Good luck and hats off to you all Paul
I have been folding nearly 7 years, but monitoring leccy use since 1989 (sad git ) and folding probably costs me £25 to £30 a week, which I fully realise. I guess if I had known mum was gonna die so suddenly and FAH held the solution I would have done as much as I could afford, but I didn't know. I just hope our contributions help at least someone out there in the future
What you need is kids at Uni and shift all the rigs there cos the leccy is free as part of accomodation costs
Thats the only reason i've been able to keep up with the level of folding i have. when i move out into a house next year im gonna have to do some serious saving if i wanna carry on
Really sorry to see you wind things down after such a good contribution kerno. Would be great if you could fire up your cpus for a short period during the chimps challenge. +1 to Doc's advice. Even knowing all the facts it's hard not to be shocked by the first bill. The trick is to expect to be shocked.
Sad to see you go, as other's have said, hopefully you'll be able to put a bit of crunching into the chimps challenge. And they only reason i'm folding at th rate I am is due to being in halls, so no leccy bill
There is an alternative to giving up folding altogether. A GTX 460 can complete a WU in a few hours, and the deadlines are anything from 2 days upwards. The classic client often has deadlines of 40 days. So you can be running the clients in the background whilst doing the email and web surfing, and other low-graphics tasks, for an hour or two each day and still make a contribution. You don't need to have multiple GPUs running 24/7. Folding At Home started as being something that the PC could usefully do with spare CPU cycles, and can still be used like that. Ignore the points and competitive aspect and think of folding as giving to charity. You never know, your PC may be the one to fold a critical WU!
This. I don't fold 24/7 but only when im using the PC usually 3 or 4 hours a day. I sometimes fold while gaming if I'm playing something like wow or half life.
