45 members and we're now at 150. Is the going getting tougher?

From the looks of the Statsman page, not really.

But just in case I got my new switch set up so the rest of the farm can get into the action:

The Rusty075 [email protected] farm now consists of:

My XP2100+ workstation box,
One XP2400+,
Five XP2000+ renderboxes,
One 1900+ renderbox,
One 1800+ renderbox,
One 2100+renderbox,
The XP1900+ HTPC/LAN box,
One 1.3Ghz Tbird renderbox,
And last but not least the K6-2 350Mhz Oil cooled Kazaa server.

If my math is right that works out to right about
20 Gigs!of Folding Power.

But that'll only last a couple of more weeks, then the farm has to start earning it's keep rendering the animation for my Master's thesis.

I'm back on graphic mode now. Man I would have had 2 more WU if the console didn't have errors.

Hello:



I bet those were upload errors -- and you may have to keep trying the CLI client in order to get them uploaded and for you to get credit! Myself and others went through this early on -- that first WU shows up, but where are the next 3? I had five done, but only 2 showed up for the longest time. Frustrating, but eventually they do show up!

Great Ceasar's Ghost!

Oil cooled?

What is that?

That was a little frankensteinian experiment gone horribly wrong.

It started with an old K6 350Mhz and an all-in-one baby-AT motherboard that somehow got "donated" to me. First I swapped out the heatsink on it for a Zalman 6000AlCu that I laying around. Worked great passively cooled that way, but it wasn't silent, the PDU and HDD were still making a racket.

So I came across a radical idea....Mineral Oil Cooling. It's essentially Baby Oil. It's been used for computer cooling before, mostly by people looking to seriously overclock, but I wanted to take it a step further. The people who've reported using it before either used it with conventional water cooling blocks, or submerged just the motherboard in it. my plan was to submerge the whole computer: motherboard, PSU, HDD, everything! I built an acrylic cube 10" square and mounted the motherboard in it. Then I uncased the PSU, so it's just the bare PCB and heatsinks, and put that in the box. After sealing the breather hole on the HDD I put it in there too.

Then I filled the box with 3 Gallons of Mineral Oil.

Made a couple of interesting discoveries:
1. Regular computer fans will still spin while emmersed in Mineral Oil!.
2. You need to seal more than just the breather hole to make a HDD watertight.

I tried a couple of other methods to seal the HDD, including gooping the whole thing in silicon caulk (The Mineral Oil dissolved it ) and dipping the HDD in that rubbery stuff you can buy at the hardware store to dip tool handles in. (The Mineral Oil made that stuff return to liquid )

The last attempt was to cast the HDD in a block of acryllic. Now that worked perfectly. (It's Alive! It's Alive!) With the HDD noise blocked by the 1" of cast acryllic AND resting in the oil it was completely totally silent. The machine ran just fine like that, for a while. Turns out that the system was producing more heat than could be radiated out through the acrylic box. If the box was metal it'd probably be fine. So the temps slowly rose. I monitored them with an aquarium thermometer I suction-cupped to the wall of the box.

The temps eventually stabilized at about 55°C. Which the CPU didn't mind, but the HDD fried itself. Given the insulating blanket of cast acryllic it was probably even hotter than that inside there.

So after killing 4 harddrives I decided to give up on the idea of submerging that part. In the current machine the HDD sits in a foam box (the foam my new Seagate came in) on top of acryllic box full of oil, not in it. It'd quiet, but by no means silent.

i can't believe what i just read.

Thank you,

I think?

Ah well maybe, but I switch to graphic in the background for now to see. I would get weird errors in the console, like it would get to 20 out of 500, then next error out and start at 0 again. Though I think my machine may not be 100% stable. Unfortunately, all my Intel machines have been pretty solid, this is my first AMD machine, and I had problems from the beginning, though perhaps RAM or motherboard are off? Don't know.

I'm in W2K SP3. Course I could also have hard drive corruption too. I switched my drive out of a removable caddy and that fixed a lot of errors I was getting, but occasionally I still get some.

you bet

is mineral oil... thermally, a good conductor?

Better than air, not as good as water. But it's non-conductive.

Hello:



Yikes! Won't a corrupted drive will keep having errors until you reinstall Windows? Are there bad sectors?

As for the mobo and RAM -- what brands/types are they?

I don't know if the drive is corrupted, W2k seems to function. Only sometimes some programs will error and quit. Yeah I was thinking of a fresh install again, but what a pain.

I got Abit NV7-133 with 1800+ and 512MB DDR. I believe that when I run WinME I don't have program error problems, that is on a different hard drive. Weird gremlins like this are a pain.

Hello:

If certain programs are crashing with regularity, then there is something wrong -- either with Windows (Registry?) or with the HD. Is it formatted with NTFS? Do you have RegClean or Norton Utilities?

Its almost like (for you) Win2K and WinME switched places! I have built three Athlons with Win2K and using NTFS on the HD's and all have been very stable. Like no BSOD's and maybe one program crash overall between the three machines.

Are you pushing the RAM timings? Or maybe some of the RAM is NG? What brand of RAM is it?

Hello:

Great stuff -- we've jumped up to 51 members and the team ranking has improved to #144! Eggsellent!

[Edit] We add one member (52 now) and we improve to 143...keep 'em coming folks!

Sorry for the delay team.

I am here too, just hope I set it up right..

136 now, with 57 members. If new members keep coming on at this rate, we have a chance to hit 100 by end of April It will be touch & go...

I'm moving into a new house with 2 other people this week, and we'll set up a little network amongst our 3 computers. I'll see if I can talk them into letting me turn our house into a little folding factory, but I have my doubts. My trusty Duron 800 will be folding of course...

I've "loaned" one of the render farm machines to my roommate while he awaits Dell to send him a replacement laptop. (long story) As part of my new standard loadup (Windows, AutoCAD, Maya, etc.) I included [email protected] running as a service. It's nice to know that as he's working on his homework he's working on units too.

I popped over to [H]ardOCP for another topic and decided to glance at their discussion about Folding and other distributed computing projects. There certainly seems to be quite a large (over 4200 Folding members) and vociferous crowd over there. They are team 33 and are ranked #3 at the moment (behind anonymous and Google). Who/what is the Google team?

I must say that being in the SPCR group makes me feel like I'm having tea with a lovely set of civilized grandmothers (who are all quietly packing a major piece beneath their shawls). I much prefer the tea and company. Hmmm, Ladies Terrorist and Sewing Circle?

Anyway, after only a week Folding, I'm please to contribute to the group effort and am also pleased quietly to break rank 20 here. My box[es] still have some noise reduction to go, but at this point my home monitor is buzzing louder than the fans. Thanks to all here who have helped me in the search for silence. Now, if I can only get that IAC chamber....

Is Anonymous simply WUs that have not been allocated to a team?

I'm guessing Google team is the sum of their servers. I used to fold for the [H]orde and Google is a recent development that passed [H] in almost no time. They have considerable computing power, wherever the hell it's coming from.

As far as I've read the Google Team is powered by the spare cycles from google's servers and spidering machines. I can only imagine what kind of hardware they must be running.

I think a lot of Googles WU's come from the Google toolbar that people install on their IE6.

definitely.

I've been lurking here for a long time, and finally got around to registering. My almost always on, and fairly quiet, Athlon [email protected] is crunching away, soon to be upgraded to an XP at whichever speed I can get away with my cooling.

OK - I'm in as well. Should have 4.1GHz sending in results shortly.

Unfortunately exposed some limitations in my cooling setup: my first unit aborted when it was halfway
"If you often see other project units terminating early like this too, you may wish to check the stability of your computer (issues such as high temperature, overclocking, etc.)." aarghh! And then spent 4 hours waiting to find the server. So had a bit of downtime today readjusting fans; currently trying an 8412NGL on the SLK without QFan.

Welcome to the board and to the team, CHHAS.

You too, Dukla!

Wow! 65 members!!! I see we're at 131 now. Amazing the power of numbers! I am going to try to rev up my test plaform farm (as Rusty describes his collection) in my lab today to contribute cycles. Should be several GHz worth.