Folding Forum

I haven't priced leasing time on a VPS, but the answer will depend on what you can get for €10 a month. It will also depend a bit on your goals, and perhaps even on the time of year.

One aspect of folding on your own hardware you may not have thought about, during the heating season the PC acts as a small space heater. So €10 spent on running it may be offset in whole or part by savings on what you spend to heat your residence. During the warm months however that may increase costs of cooling. So there are folders who do more @home during the winter.

If your goal is the most points, then depending on what you can get for €10 using a leased VPS can get you more.

Windows has better driver support for AMD GPUs.
Had you have a GTX 1660, roughly the equivalent of the 480 in terms of performance, you'd seen a very high speed boost in Linux over Windows.

My advise, is to leave at least 1 to 2 CPU cores free to feed the GPU.
Also, try to make sure the GPU gets 16 lanes, as your PCI bus is only Gen 2 (PCIE 2.0), not 3.0, your ram is DDR2 or DDR3, not DDR4
All these things add up to lower PPD reading than expected.
You could boost your PC by buying a small SSD (64 for Linux, or 128GB for Windows, is more than enough), to at least have decent read and writes, as well as lower latencies.

Cloud GPU hire via Vast.ai was actually an "economical" way to fold a couple of years ago, depending on your local power costs, before crypto and GPU scarcity made it too expensive to be worth it. The most efficient way to contribute now, perhaps, is to fold when you need heating, and just donate the money to science when you don't.

Joe_dela_Hiti wrote:I have had another thought though that I would like to share with the audience. I've recently gotten an energy certificate for my house and as we were monitoring the electric power use, the Q9450 machine was showing a constant use between 180 and 190 Watt which translates into a monthly cost just over €10. I was wondering, since I seem to be willing to pay €10/month to support science, if it wouldn't be smarter to rent a VPS for the folding instead. Surely a VPS is running on more current hardware, so I'd expect even a single core to perform better than the Q9450. Anybody has any thought on / experience with that ?

How much PPD do you get from your current system ? What kind of VPS are you looking at ?

Note : VPS use shared hardware resources, so constant load from a customer might be prohibited ...

The cheapest thing to rent I found at reasonable prices are Spot instances with Tesla T4 GPUs at GCP ... but it's something in the 60-100$ per month price range.

It's always cheaper to fold at home ... but it's always better to think about about efficiency (that you could measure in PPD/W in FAH).

Would be awesome if there was a website that would allow for transactions to take place in return for services.

For home users like me, we have some hardware spare, but not the $$$ for electricity.
$25 on donation would roughly give the equivalent of 1 month of folding on a modern GPU.
There's no way to lower the cost any more.
From the $25, a few dollars go to tax, the hardware purchase, and roughly half of it goes to electricity.