Are there any Adverse effects of running Folding@home?

[BiikeMike]

I am very interested in contributing what I can to this project, but it seems to me that having your processors slammed all the time is not necessarily the best thing to be doing. Although on the other hand, thats what these machines are made for, right?

Any insight?

 

[psingh01]

Large businesses try very hard to get every ounce of processing power out of a cpu, otherwise it is just wasted money to have the cpu sitting there doing nothing but sucking power. If you've got the power to spare, why not use it?

 

[BiikeMike]

Large businesses try very hard to get every ounce of processing power out of a cpu, otherwise it is just wasted money to have the cpu sitting there doing nothing but sucking power. If you've got the power to spare, why not use it?

Thats basically my thoughts

 

[brooker]

It will use more power, but if electricity is cheap where you are, it may not be a big deal. Uh... if you really want to see the effect, you could get one of those power meters that plugs into your outlet, and tells you how much juice your hardware is sucking -- there will likely be a big difference when the machine is under load as opposed to idle, even on the MP, which isn't exactly optimized to conserve power.

but hey, you do have the power, so fold away!

 

[Magnus Reftel]

I am very interested in contributing what I can to this project, but it seems to me that having your processors slammed all the time is not necessarily the best thing to be doing. Although on the other hand, thats what these machines are made for, right?

Any insight?

Apart from the power issue that others have mentioned, the only bad thing that folding@home could cause that I can come up with is increased wear on the CPU fan. Shouldn't be a big problem, though.

 

[miniConvert]

I dislike the increased noise and heat that these programs cause by running the CPU flat out. Also, although they're not supposed to, I do find they make systems a tiny bit more unresponsive.

I love the idea, but the reality is that I always end up removing them after a few work units.

 

[Lycanthrope]

I dislike the increased noise and heat that these programs cause by running the CPU flat out. Also, although they're not supposed to, I do find they make systems a tiny bit more unresponsive.

I love the idea, but the reality is that I always end up removing them after a few work units.

I'm running SETI using the BOINC client on my iMac and a couple of Windoze laptops. The iMac doesn't show any ill effects from the extra processing - no fan noise, no perceptable slow-down of other processes. The laptops on the other hand behave completely differently, it's almost impossible to do a parallel task while SETI is running and the fans are constantly at full speed - they sound like a couple of jet engines getting ready for take-off.

The strange think though is that the both the Windows laptops process SETI work-units quicker than the iMac and this I find strange especially as the older machine is a 900Mhz Celeron with bugger-all memory. The settings on all machines are the same so I'm at a loss to explain this...