Welcome to our Folding Team!

  • Folding at home is a project by the Stanford University that uses our computing power to help study the process of protein folding so as to aid research on various diseases, including many forms of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's.

  • You can install a small program on your computer (or even android phone!) and it downloads a small amount of data that it analyses, then returning the results to the Stanford researchers. You can even choose what disease research to base the bulk of your computing power on (be it cancer or any one the others mentioned above), or just let it fold them all!

  • Everyone, no matter the hardware they possess, has a chance to help the research for cancer and other illnesses, and, perhaps, make a big difference in the life of other people. Who knows if we ourselves, or our children won't benefit from these researches? Here I am running it on a Pentium 4(!). While a modern CPU and GPU will be tenfold faster at folding (Here's an i5-6500/GTX 970, every little bit can help! It's effectively making it so scientists get faster access to information!

  • You can either have it just be on your taskbar and not bother you at all unless you click it, all the way to seeing a graphic representation of the protein you're helping research (that can also be used as a screensaver) or even read about the specific research you're helping, in real-time!

JOINING IS EASY AND TAKES 3 MINUTES!

  • Visit this link and click on the "fah-installer" link

  • Install the software and everything is very self explanatory.

  • If you don't want to, you don't even need to choose usernames, verify e-mails or anything of the sort! It's that easy!

  • You can, if you want, choose a username (which doesn't need to be unique and that you can change at any time!), select to be part of a team (we have a PCMR team. To join just input 225605 at the initial screen or later on in the software settings)

  • In the initial config screen, you can also have a passkey e-mailed to you by Stanford University. This is a string that you can add here and that will give you extra folding points if you finish your work units before scheduled (which is quite common on higher end hardware)!

And that's it. You're ready to go! You can start up the software and choose to have it start automatically when you boot up, or manually at your discretion!

But doesn't this make my computer run very hot?

  • Not necessarily. And there's power sliders you can choose from! Light/Medium/Full are options you can choose depending on what you are trying to achieve. Perhaps you have a small home server that's on most of the day, or perhaps your parents use their own computers to check their e-mails and watch the occasional powerpoint e-mails. In these cases, why not install and set the program to run at LOW at all times? Most people find that setting it at low barely has an impact on performance and temperatures.

  • Many people also find that running it at medium or even high makes no difference on what concerns performance if you're only just browsing the internet.

  • You can even set it so it only uses your computing power when you're at idle!

  • You can use a program like TThrottle to suspend and resume the execution of the tasks based on the CPU / GPU temperature.

  • You can even set the f@h software so that it only uses X cores on your CPU and a program like MSI Afterburner so that your GPU will never go past a certain temperature when folding.

If instead you are going for MAX/FULL power folding, then know that Folding@home is designed to max your parts. You're going to be running near TDP. What does that mean?

It means that your temperatures will be higher. So you may want to check what they reach and/or tweak your CPU/GPU fan curves so they run at a higher speed. These parts are designed for this, however.

As always, you're the one who knows best what you're trying to achieve, but know that having this software start up at boot and running on low at all times will usually have barely any effect on performance/temperatures.

Consider running a monitoring program alongside when folding at a constant FULL level. Some program recommendations are OCCT, MSI's Afterburner or other similar programs.

THE PCMR TEAM

If you have any questions, ask them here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/5ms9hy/lets_continue_to_fight_against_cancer_together/