Page 1 of 1

How are the beta clients now days?

Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2009 3:03 pm
by Convert
I stopped actively folding a while ago after about 4 years of constant upkeep of my farm and clients. I figured if I was going to fold I should be taking full advantage of the hardware so I moved over to Beta clients. With them constantly expiring and otherwise inexplicably stopping I had enough of it.

With that said, how are they now days? I have an i7 rig, some quad and dual core setups along with 3 high end nvidia cards and 2 high end ATI cards that I wouldn't mind getting folding. Do they still expire, how long do they last between expiring? Are there still cleanup issues, as in after expiring you have to scrub files out of the system in order for the new install to function properly?

Re: How are the beta clients now days?

Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 5:53 am
by farmpuma
I believe most of the Beta clients have reached a fairly stable state and their expiration dates are now considerably longer. Although the only one I have personal knowledge of is the officially dead 5.91 (and 5.92) Win SMP client which was renewed this month for a full year. And the renewal only involved a drop-in replacement of the .exe file. The Linux SMP client seems to be the best bet for multi-core CPUs and the GPU2 client seems very stable as long as one has recent video drivers. I don't recall a recent renewal for the GPU2 client, so one is probably coming soon, although we can hope for minimum heartburn. And my dial-up connection can't handle the Linux SMP large WU files.

The hardware you listed would be a major boost for our team which is in the middle of the summer slowdown. It would definitely put you up among the big dawgs and might even challenge the current King, JPinTO. But, be aware that those high end GPUs are quite power hungry. I've had to subsidize my son's part-time 9800GTX+ effort on my behalf at $13 per month for 100 hours of folding per week. I hope you have low electrical service rates.