Info 

Welcome to the Tom's Hardware F@H Team Thread (Team 40051)!

Due to a number of longstanding chronic issues with the previous threads, we present to you all a brand new thread, stickified with some extra strong adhesives, for our illustrious folding team! You can find the original thread here, which may still be useful, albeit with outdated information.

Welcome to the Tom's Hardware F@H Team Thread (Team 40051)!

With coronavirus in the air (quite literally), it's time for us all to come together and do our part. Don't just sit at home and twiddle your thumbs during the quarantine, fold for science! With your help, and enough processing power, we can collectively fold proteins and find a cure for the coronavirus. No this isn't science fiction, this is Folding@home!

The Tom's Hardware Community staff has created a new folding@home team for the Tom's Hardware Community. We've included detailed instructions on how to join the Tom's Hardware Folding@home team below. But first, what is folding?

What is Folding@home?
Folding@home is a project started by Stanford University that allows anyone to donate spare processing cycles (from your CPU and GPU) to compute complex calculations in a massive distributed research network. You can learn more about folding@home here.

Among the more well-known diseases that benefit from this research are Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS, many cancers, and most recently, the novel coronavirus, covid-19. If you’ve ever known anybody who has been afflicted by any of those, then you know how devastating it can be for them and their families. This is your chance to help combat these illnesses and all it takes on your part is leaving the program running while you’re asleep or at work! Every contribution will help in advancing treatments and, hopefully, will eventually lead to cures.

How can I join the Tom's Hardware Folding@home Team?
  1. First head to the official folding@home website and download the correct client based on your OS. Here is a direct link to the download page: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/
  2. Install the client. If you are windows, clicking advanced will allow you to decide when the software will start. We recommend for you to star the software at login.
  3. Start folding@home!
    hzOCB5M.png
  4. A browser window should automatically open with the client running. Make sure to click the "Set up an identity" bubble before clicking start folding
    D9i9Tcq.png
  5. On the next screen set your name and team number. Make sure to join team 40051. Your name can be anything you wish, but we recommend for you to use your forum username if available. At the time of this writing the passkey generator was not working. The servers are really busy and there are not enough work unit's for all current participants. Some user's have had to wait a day or more for passkeys. To learn more about passkeys, click here.
    bPbAhsZ.png
With this set up in place your computer will provide work units to the team. Keep in mind, closing the browser does not stop folding. Folding is a background process. To stop folding navigate to client.foldingathome.org and click "Stop Folding".
xUZH2Wf.png


FAQ
TO check the team's current stats, and your own, head to http://folding.stanford.edu/Stats.

What do all these crazy letters like “WU” and “PPD” mean?
All these letters are just short type for a full words:

WU = Work Units
PPD = Points per Day
PPW = Point per Watt or Points per Week.
TPF = Time per Frame
WTF! = Way to fold!

What is Bonus Points and Qualified WU's?
  • Bonus point is when you turned in WU earlier than what the deadline says and you earn extra points because it.
  • Qualified WU's mean certain WU's that can be turned in early for bonus points.
  • Except for some older Single core CPU WU's and older GPU WU's, All WU are qualified for bonuses.
What about overclocking?
While the F@H group doesn't "officially support nor oppose overclocking", you can overclock and gain more points.

The catch is however that F@H is more sensitive to instability than most other stress programs will detect. Even if your computer is "Prime 95 stable" for a week straight, it isn't 100% fool-proof on the cpu when it comes to folding.

F@H recommend using these stress programs that closely mimic how F@H run for both your GPU and CPU.

Conclusion
Wow you made it this far?! Kudos to you! Be sure to sign up now for the team. In the coming days there will be an announcement for a friendly competition between this and two other PC hardware focus sites. Stay tuned!

Happy folding :giggle:
 
I use to run F@H years ago.

I downloaded last night and it's been folding away! Make sure to get the key too.

I have a 3800x and 2070S in a less than optimized case regarding airflow.

Want to see how good your Ryzen cooling is, then F@H is quite a stress test for heat load.

Join the fight guys. It could save someone you know and love!
 

EndEffeKt_24

Commendable
Mar 27, 2019
659
157
1,340
Hey people,
I just started folding a couple of days ago and wanted to share my experience and questions so far.
Especially the differences in cpu and gpu folding are still a bit confusing for me personally.

At the moment my RTX 2080 is folding away rather constantly 2M points a day while running 55-65°c under water and using round about 160W of power. The gpu is undervolted to 0.95v using Afterburner.
In contrast my R7 3700x was only gaining 100k points a day while using 80w power on 7 working cores and getting pretty toasty with 83°c. I then stopped folding with my cpu because the temps were a bit to high for a 24/7 workload and the much lower effectivity was another discouraging factor. In regards to the temp of the cpu there really seems to be a problem with heat dissapation to the water most likely due to the non-centered chiplet on the cpu. My loop has no problems holding my targeted water temperature under the load, but still the cpu stabilizes at 83 °c.

My questions:
  1. Is there a good option apart from setting "low, middle and full power" to change the number of cpu cores the programm uses?
  2. Is the effectivity of gpu folding really that much higher or is there something wrong with my settings?
  3. How are your impressions with the temp of Ryzen cpus under full load using water cooling?
 
  • Like
Reactions: bit_user

AliusBU

Reputable
Nov 30, 2016
32
1
4,535
First off, welcome! And thanks for joining us!
  1. If you right click the FAH icon in the notification area ("system tray") by the clock in the right side of the Windows taskbar, then click 'Advanced Control' it will open the FAHControl application. In there, you can click the Configure button, navigate to the Slots tab, choose the cpu slot, and click 'Edit'. The default will probably be -1 (for automatic thread count selection). If you enter a specific number in here it will restrict CPU folding to that number of CPU threads. Entering 4 would use up to 4 CPU cores on a CPU without SMT (Hyperthreading /AMD equivalent). With SMT the max number of threads you can run doubles (although folding speed does not, since it's not a true doubling of available cores. SMT/HT can eek out some extra points though). This should let you test to see if you can get your temps down. Be aware that they warn changing the # of threads/cores during a work unit may cause the work unit to fail. I have had this happen, but I have also adjusted mid-fold and had WUs still succeed. Using an even number is generally a good idea here. It also helps to leave the CPU not running at 100% to help feed the GPU its work.
  2. Folding benefits greatly from parallelism, so the more cores/stream processors available, the faster the work gets accomplished, and the more points you will get. So yes, GPUs kick butt here. Even though your Ryzen has a lot more 'smarts' per-core than your RTX 2080, at the end of the day, the Ryzen can only give at most 16 threads (8 cores), whereas the 2080 has 2944 CUDA cores - that's a lotta cores!
  3. Afraid I do not have any experience water cooling Ryzen (mine is only a lowly R5 1600 anyhow), but 83C seems high to me, certainly for 24/7 work and chip longevity
 
  • Like
Reactions: EndEffeKt_24

jwcrellin

Reputable
Just signed up. Currently leveraging my 3700X @91% and 1070@50%. Feels good to help find a cure while sitting on my butt.

Edit: CPU temps get a little toasty. 87c on EKWB 360 open loop. FYI
 
Last edited:
Mar 22, 2020
2
0
10
Hello to all there,
It's Diego from Italy.
I'd like to join but I saw in preference that F@H client is setted to local host 127.0.0.1 that should be a loopback ip. Is it possible to change it, perhaps with my pc lan ip (I tryed but all become not available).
How to setup local host ip? Probably I haven't understand exactly the meaning of these preference.
Someone may help?
Bye to all and thank you for any answer.
Diego
 
Last edited:
Just signed up. Currently leveraging my 3700X @91% and 1070@50%. Feels good to help find a cure while sitting on my butt.

Edit: CPU temps get a little toasty. 87c on EKWB 360 open loop. FYI

This is interesting. It seems you need to have stellar cooling to run F@H with the new Ryzen CPU’s.

I thought my cooling was poor but other stress tests dont appear to push the temps like F@H does.
 

EndEffeKt_24

Commendable
Mar 27, 2019
659
157
1,340
This is interesting. It seems you need to have stellar cooling to run F@H with the new Ryzen CPU’s.

I thought my cooling was poor but other stress tests dont appear to push the temps like F@H does.
I guess the problem is the design of the waterblocks that maximize the heat disipation in the centre of the cpu, while the 3700x has its chiplet sitting in the lower corner. Some overclockers like Igor suggested flipping some blocks arround and Roman "der Bauer" even created a solution to slide the block a couple of mm on the cpu to improve temps by arround 7c.

My watertemps and fan speed is fine while folding with gpu and cpu, but it seems I just cannot transfer the heat to the water adequately.
 
Folding@Home is almost as hard on a CPU as Prime95 torture test.About the same if you disable AVX.
The code is optimized to finish as soon as possible using all resources available.
It takes very good cooling to handle 100% load 24/7/365.
Case air flow is critical along with custom fan curves for case fans, CPU, and GPU.
 
  • Like
Reactions: warmon6
Been gone for a while but started hearing about F@H fighting Covid-19. ... Came back to see whats going on with Tom's Team and HOLY MOLY..... 1k+ folders on the team. :bounce:

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=40051

Also nice to see a new fresh guide to get people quickly setup.

If people need any question answered that isn't in this guide, the teams old guide might be able to answer a few of those questions. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/toms-hardware-folding-home-team-40051-guide.92271/#t499234

(Sorry for the mess in that old guide. Haven't been maintaining it and multiple forum changes really altered the look of things.)
 
Last edited:
Jsimenhoff

Just want to point out in the FAQ Overclocking part, the last link is a dead link and doesn't seem to have alternatives from the F@H Group.

It used to lead to FAHBench, MemtestG80, and MemtestCL software for stress testing the CPU and/or GPU.

Whether these dont match F@H usage patterns anymore or F@H group doesn't want to link to them anymore I haven't been able to determine.
 
Hello to all there,
It's Diego from Italy.
I'd like to join but I saw in preference that F@H client is setted to local host 127.0.0.1 that should be a loopback ip. Is it possible to change it, perhaps with my pc lan ip (I tryed but all become not available).
How to setup local host ip? Probably I haven't understand exactly the meaning of these preference.
Someone may help?
Bye to all and thank you for any answer.
Diego

For a Single machine, the loopback IP address is fine as that's the client software looking at the host machine (you could put your current machine ip address in but you'd be doing the same exact thing as the loopback address. So it makes the process pointless.)

The real reason why you'd want to mess with the IP address is if you had multiple computers running F@H and wanted to control them from one system. (Remote Connection/Access F@H called it awhile back).

He's an old video I did demoing it back in 2012

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syou9u9B_aY


(Sorry, never gotten around to fixing the audio issue on this video but it should still show what that the software is able to do.)
 
I joined Team Tom. I haven't yet had a WU that used the CPU.

Yeah from reading the F@H support forum, there has been a MASSIVE amount of users coming in since the Covid-19 outbreak and it's out stripping the F@H team ability to keep their servers full of WU's for our computers to process. (Think I read somewhere on that forum that there been a 5x to 6x demand increase of WU from before the outbreak).

So your CPU might be sitting for a while with nothing to do. lol
 
Mar 22, 2020
2
1
15
Let them sit ready to go, especially before you go to bed.

Just make sure your cooling is up to the task if you are going above "Light" setting.
The first time I left it running on my Ryzen 2600 (all stock) on middle setting, I found it reached more than 80°C, which is waay too hot for my liking. This is in my old (but gold) Coolermaster Cosmos S with 2 exhaust fans and 1 intake fan so air flow is ok.
So after that I upgraded from Wraith Stealth (always on 100% speed and quite loud) to a cheap Arctic Freezer 7x (paid only 16-17 EUR here in Croatia) and replaced old exhaust fans with new Arctic silent fans and now it hovers around 52-55°C under full load and noise levels are a night and day difference, both at idle and load.

If any of you are upgrading your stock AMD cooler, remember to twist the cooler before pulling it out to prevent ripping your cpu from socket and possibly bending the pins! (dont ask me how I know)
 
Last edited: