Tight Deadlines for Work Units ETA same as Deadline

[ThatcheRoof]

Hi,
I have been using folding@home for quite a while now on different machines. I have noticed that the ETA for most of my recent projects have been a bit tight. For example the current project Project 18417 gives me an ETA of 3.96 days and states My computer has 4.08 days to complete this work unit. This means that I need to leave my computer on for days in order for it to stand a chance of completing this work unit. My raspberry pi 3B takes approximately 2 X the required time and therfore always fails to finish work units. My desktop PC has 2 Quadro T600s which chomps through work units and usually has no problem finishing WUs but has recently been seeing the same pattern, on some but not all of it's work units.
My question is :- Am I still being credited for work done by my machines or should I just stop contributing? Am I actually contributing anything at all to the projects or just wasting electricity?
It's a shame if all this work is just being wasted. I think that work should be given a much longer dealine than the exact time required to complete them.
Also, what do the bracketed numbers mean inside ie 18417 (75, 4, 96) and PRCG?

Thanks

[Joe_H]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

First, to start with the Raspberry Pi. The minimum supported device is the Raspberry Pi 4 or better, there will be few projects that a 3B will complete in time.

Is the estimate for time to complete right after a WU starts or after it has completed several percent? The estimates will not be accurate early on for any project that the client has not processed before. It kept a small history database to use for improving estimates. Projects done before will show better estimates.

Your Quadra T600s have about the same processing capability as a GT 1030 GPU. That is about the minimum level currently supported, though some slower GPUs will process some WUs within deadlines. The T600 is grouped with some more powerful GPUs, that is why you see some projects they have trouble completing. There is a project working on realigning the groupings, but they just finished doing that for the AMD cards and it may take a bit before they get to the Nvidia cards. What exactly you will get for now is partly up to chance.

You do get credit for any WU returned by the end of the final deadline. You get bonus points if you have a passkey for WUs returned by the Timeout.

As for the WU description, the first number is the Project number, then the numbers in the parentheses are Run, Clone and Gen in that order. Some further details are included in the Welcome topic - viewtopic.php?t=26036.