Say “I do folding at home” when you’re with company and you’ll responses like “Oh, Susan does that too and she folds my pants really well!” – well technically both are FOLDING and often done at HOME but they’re not the same. 🙂
I guess you know by now I’m talking about the former.
What is Folding@home?
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
More details HERE
Should You Fold?
It’s entirely up to you. For me, I’ve stopped folding for quite a while due to the heat generated by the component I use and nowadays I still fold but at a lesser scale. The components I used generate a huge amount of heat when running 24/7 and to make things worse, it adds a chunk to your electricity bill.
Using the less efficient components probably does more harm than good. Rather than being an evangelist for Folding@home – I’d rather let you be the decision maker.
Your Folding Gear
Best Folding@home components so far are nVidia based graphic cards (I recommend at least a GT 240, or if you can get an old 8800GT / 9600GT, that’ll be great too!). New generation processors like the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K processors are great for folding@home too.
I was doing Folding@home for a long time and without many processors, I was progressing but not by much. Then one day I was given the chance to try out Asus’ GTX 295. 😀 I saw my score rose so fast, it didn’t take long to reach top 20 in Team Malaysia. Later on I had various other graphic cards, at one point I had Galaxy GTX 260+, GTS 250, GT 240 and GT 220 folding all at once and I was getting about 15,000 – 20,000.
At the time of this article, I’m the only solo-folder to have 2 accounts at Top 15. 
(solo, meaning doing it alone. You can have a bunch of friends contributing to an account)
What!??!?! Malaysians Do Folding?
Yes, as a matter of fact we have a rather active community over at Lowyat.Net
So if you’re keen on giving Folding@home a try, come join us and contribute to Team Malaysia
*This is an AWARENESS article – I’m not a Folding@home evangelist, nor am I paid to write about the distributed computing project.*
I fold, do you?
; )
Thinking back.. I had been folding for about 10 years but felt I didn’t had much progress.
i used to do folding on my ps3. but not anymore. but will be thinking of starting on my pc.
just noticed you mentioned folding using GPU. i downloaded the GPU version of it, but still doesnt work. mine is ATI, does that mean that i need to downgrade my Catalyst driver or sth like that? Will that still work if i want to use my machine as gaming machine?
ATI card not worth using for folding. neither are AMD processors. 🙂
Strange you’re getting that message though, as I’ve folded with HD4xxx series before without problem. Not sure how it’s like nowadays.