TR Forums

How long can you fold for? Does the rig need a break after a while. I've had mine going for three days straight.What are the real world dangers to the hardware.

Dell Inspiron 530 Intel Q9300@ 2.5ghz, 4 gigs, GTX 260, 750W PSU

I fold solidly 24x7x365. As long as you have a stable system, the only danger is with the extra heat that may shorten the lifetime of other components in your system. If your system isn't a laptop, is in a cool room and the airflow in the case is fine keeping the temperatures on things like the hard drive down, then you will be fine.

If your rig is not absolutely 110% stable then folding WILL crash it, although that doesn't really damage the hardware, just the software load.

I keep my P3 folding 24/7, has been for the last 2 years and its going strong. Only been shut off three times i 2 years.

It's not a working horse, you don't have to give it sleep, food or anything. As long as it can go for an hour without overheating, it's nearly sure to go for a long time too without any problems, considering you're happy with your electricity bills.

if your not get an old P3, they dont consume much power compared to a modern rig lol

As long as you're not running one the beta clients then there really isn't much to worry about with 24/7 folding. I have let my computer run for weeks while I'm gone and the GPU client might exit, but the regular ol' F@H cpu client is still going strong.

Great I will go 24/7 with my rig.


My sister wants to do this and has a Dell Inspiron 1520 Laptop with Core 2 @ 1.5ghz and a 128MB Nvidia 8400 GS Mobile..


Should she fold with gpu or cpu software on her's... Her graphics card should win the race no?

Yes... however I don't think I'd ever fold on a laptop, over-heating is a rather common issue when you tax those things for too long.

candle_86 wrote:

if your not get an old P3, they dont consume much power compared to a modern rig lol

They're not very efficient from a power/processing standpoint, though. They're not worth running (from an economic point of view) for computational purposes.

Just set my laptop up for folding an hour ago [for TR of course] but in a cold room with a big laptop cooler under it going all out. Hope that's okay--I had to start somewhere.

I'd quote myself, but then I'd feel like a pansy, so I'll just say good luck, and I hope the extra cooling works out for ya.

matdem1 wrote:

Are there dangers in folding 24/7?

Yes, the addiction is terminal!

matdem1 wrote:

What are the real world dangers to the hardware.

I used to fold on HD4850 with stock GPU fan and it's pretty hot.
But now I use 3rd party GPU fan and overall temperature is much better.

For CPU clients running on a desktop system, I'd say the danger is close to zero, assuming you don't have some marginal component in there that is about to fail anyway.

For GPU clients, it's gonna depend. Pushing a GPU hard 24/7 won't be an issue if it has a quality cooler on it... but I've seen an awful lot of video cards with marginal coolers.

I would hesitate to fold 24x7 on a laptop unless you've got some extra air blowing on it to help keep the temps down.

Edit: To give you some real-world anecdotal evidence for desktop systems... I've run folding on systems for years without ill effect. This has included my primary desktop systems, home servers, and cobbled together diskless "crate farm" systems. The record holder is probably my home file server box (an Athlon 800), which folded 24x7 for nearly 5 years (the system still runs fine, I just don't fold on it any more). My current web server (an Athlon XP 1800+) is also approaching 4 years of 24x7 folding. My current "heavy hitters" are a trio of Athlon X2s (and a single Phenom X4); even with stock cooling, the CPUs do not get very hot.

(Thread moved to Distributed Computing...)

To help with keeping your PC case and internal components cooler, you can use an app like RivaTuner that lets you manually set the GPU cooling fan to a good speed so there is always plenty of air flow to distibute the extra GPU heat generated by folding. I set mine to 50%-60% depending on the GPU.