How slow is too slow?

[unacceptable_risk]

Hello folders,

I'm in a room surrounded by computers and I'd like to do some folding.

My question is, At which point is a computer just not fast enough to bother trying to fold with it?

For what its worth, I have every thing between 486 and athlon covered, including a beauwolf with 4 p100 in it(doing nothing) a pair of 233mmx 64mb, a pair of celeron 366 that I was going to mod for dual application and my athlon 1600 that I really do overclock @ night.

On top of that, I have cable connection and a good switched Lan.
The big box is used pretty solidly but has 6hrs idle at night.
If any of those other machines could be useful, I would luv to hear about it.

Would be great to get them folding.
Thanks people.

[Drake]

If it folds, it's not too slow.

How do you think Lee got his fourty odd gigahertz of crunching ability :D?

[mdzcpa]

Originally posted by Drake
If it folds, it's not too slow.


Amen brother

[lechumbl]

Hi unacceptable_risk,

Well said, Mr. Drake.

I have everything from a P II 266 to a P IV 2.53 GHz system on line.
Sure, the 266 is slow, but a unit a week is better than no unit a week.

As was said, nothing is too slow.

Take care, and crunch and fold away..........

[unacceptable_risk]

Thats awesome.
I can tell that I will need to stretch my very basic linux knowledge to get this up. but look forward to it.

I have a full fileing cabinet drawer of old small 170meg - 280 meg ide drives, tested work fine nearly useless tho.

Can you set me straight on how much hd space will be required by the fully installed (folding software), and how much handling/processing/storage room does the system require to be effective.

While I,m at it, I might as well ask how much ram would the lower limit be.(I know more ram is better)

Basically would 1 p166 with 64m of ram and 1 gig of hd, fold more than 2 p166's with 32m ram and 500m hd each.?

Thanks for the assistance

[Drake]

I use the plain-text console so my install is only ~6MB. On average I'd say that 6-7MB of memory is used while folding.

I'm not sure, but perhaps F@H could run off DOS? I'll need to try one of these days.

Right now I have a p166 and a k-6 500MHz sitting in the corner doing nothing, when they could help me break my 4 GHz barrier :p.

I have a 1733 @ 1893, a 1533, and a 500 MHz machine under my belt so far, and I may be gaining another 1733 MHz soon, along with the two machines sitting in the corner :D.