Electricity usage

Now that I have a half-decent rig again, I am wondering about getting back into folding. My concern is the electricity use. What effect has folding had on your power bill?

If you fold on just 1 rig full time, I'm guessing you will see a slight increase. It depends on a lot of things. Dual core, quad , hexa or better. Gpu folding? 1 or more cards?
Peak and off peak rates factor in too.

Our friends @ EVGA have a sticky on their folding forum about it.

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=556120

It would be great to have you back if you choose to fold with us again.

In colder climates (such as Finland and wintertime U.S.), the cost to run folding on your rig(s) is somewhat offset by the reduced heating requirements in the rooms where the computers are.

Another thing is that you can always run crunching software while your PC is in use anyway, so that there's the benefit of running the software without the need to leave the PC on all the time. That should be negligible cost, but plenty of crunching

nice to see you folding again unhyper

Yeah, I'm using this wattage reader or whatever it's called... Normal consumption for the PC is around 70-90 W, and folding on CPU with SMP client (all four cores @ 100%) makes it go up to about 120W, which is not a bad increase. I haven't checked what kind of numbers I get during gaming, nor have I tried a GPU client yet, because I am a bit concerned that the constant use of the GPU might shorten its lifespan considerably.

All I know is that my GTS 450 has been OC'd and folding 24/7 since November.

The card already had a Free Performance Boost from 783MHz to 822MHz and I'm pushing it at 900MHz. As long as the temps stay down, I don't think running the cards will hurt anything. In fact it has been posted several times, keeping a constant temperature is better than allowing the temperature to change every few minutes.

That makes sense. I guess I am just overprotective of my PC, because it's an OEM build (HP) and those tend to not have much going on in terms of proper cooling, and because I just bought it a month ago and so it's still my newborn.

I can say, I do understand.

Do what you feel is right, and things will be fine.

Same here.