Monsterkater

Thanks everyone for your donation to a good cause, it was a lot of fun for me and I'm very much looking forward to the next one!

I'm with Steve on that one, glad to finally be able to use a more polished GeForce Experience again after abandoning it altogether when they made sign-in mandatory. But still I hope the information density of the old Control Panel will in some way be kept alive, I don't want to dig through however many levels of menus to find a setting like with the new Windows settings app.

I'll just go ahead and put the blame purely on timezones. Gosh, how I hate those things! To top it all of, my 13700KF didn't want to play nicely and even corrupted the GPU's work unit, that's what you get for trying to fold on untested settings. Guess I'll have to resort to folding on the GPUs only, oh well. With 25M PPD (give or take) on the GPUs alone, the CPU doesn't really contribute much anyways. Still bums me out for the time lost fiddling until finally giving up and falling back to GPU-only. Moral of that story: Test, test, test your settings before folding and then test them once again for good measure!

Damn, I thought the event would start 24hrs later than it did. Well, better late than never I suppose, let's do this!

Now that this foldathon is over, I seem to have actually made it into the top ten, despite the late start. It was fun as always and all the hardware survived, which is nice. Thanks everyone for your contribution to a great cause, hope to see you again for the February foldathon!

We recently moved, so I might be IN if I can manage to get everything up and running in time

IN Monsterkater

I can absolutely attest to that, there's a countless number of times where I personally didn't sign up for smth because it required a subscription. For me at least it isn't even an irrational fear tbh, not least thanks to ADHD I'm missing cancellation deadlines fairly regularly. Thrice in my life did I miss the cancellation deadline for my mobile contract, causing it to prolong for at least another year (two years before it was made illegal to automatically prolong contracts for longer than a year). Now we even have legislature capping automatic prolongings to one month, which is an absolute godsend for me personally. I especially refrain from "free" trial periods where you're required to provide payment info beforehand, because I just can't rely on myself to cancel it in time, resulting in me paying for stuff I didn't have any intention paying for. Burnt child dreads the fire, y'know? Yup, that's a definite agree from me as well!

I 100% agree. While I myself wouldn't take issue with paying more - I'd draw the line somewhere around 25 bucks personally - I assume most people won't be willing to pay more than $10, if that. That being said, this might be off-topic but I do see a niche for a gala-like fundraising event, separate from the foldathon: Good point. Most prize draws I came across were free (well, monetarily at least, you do pay in personal data), however I'm not sure what the terms where regarding Quebec in those cases. I don't get what the issue hinges on really, is it the upfront cost or is it the prizes themselves because in winning those, there is a game of chance involved? If it's the latter, 2023's foldathon was already problematic; otherwise could we maybe circumvent this by making the payments voluntary, that way Quebec residents could just not pay for it and it should be fine, hopefully?

To circumvent issues like 1) I had a similar idea of somehow crowdfunding distribution expenses. I also think around ten bucks for shipping is fair; our biggest (though not necessarily the best) parcel service charges 6.99 nationally for basic shipping including tracking. Add to that the cost of getting a fitting box and transporting all those prizes to a shipping outlet. So yeah, 10 bucks is reasonable. Very. 2) Yeah, folding 96h on end was quite taxing, on the hardware (I had drivers crash a few times over the course of the first day) as well as on the inside temperature side of things. Still, it was very fun and I even pushed on to get three figures, crushing the 100h mark. That little dopamine kick when seeing that leftmost numeral flip from naught to 1 just feels too great. Therefore, I'd say let's make that a full work-week, ie five days or 120 hours. 3) That would not only be cool, it'd be a very welcome modification. For us, March was already quite warm this year so having the big competition a little earlier would be greatly appreciated on my part. As an addition to 1) I was thinking about maybe getting one volunteer per participant's nation, as kind of a one-person distribution center. Seeing that domestic shipping usually is a lot less hassle than sending stuff internationally, I just thought it might be easier to pack one big box per nation and have the prizes be then distributed to the winners via national shipping. Depending on how shipping rates compare nationally vs internationally this might even be cheaper, but I didn't do the maths on that.

My EVGA keyboard arrived yesterday and I gotta say it was packaged better than anything I have seen before, kudos for that. It was delivered by UPS and declared as a prize. Therefore the value on the packing slip read 0.00, resulting in no import fees being charged. Also, the keyboard just looks amazing, can't wait to try it.

I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet, hopefully I will be able to later today. My 4080 manages 100+ FPS on average at 1440p / RT Ultra with DLSS FG enabled, I'm really curious to see how it does with PT. I'm intrigued, does that mean that there's a few more FPS to be had by disabling those settings when running PT or does enabling PT force those on/off? Since CDPR themselves are insisting on it being nothing more than a "technology preview", I'd say that's as fair an implementation on their part as it's a fair assumption on yours.

Yes, I'm aware of that and I don't even mind at all. However, from experience I'd expect either a letter from customs saying something along the lines of "we got a parcel for you which requires payment of X moneyunits and has to be collected within Y business days" or some sort of pick-up card from any of our parcel services, again stating that there's a parcel waiting for me with a pick-up deadline and a total amount of money they expect me to pay for handing over. If it should be delivered via DHL I wouldn't bat an eye if I'd receive an email informing me of those things, since they do have my email in their system. It wouldn't be the first time that their emails are the first thing informing about a parcel on it's way to me. But an unsolicited SMS from a number with a foreign ISD code, threatening to return some parcel to sender if some undisclosed fee isn't payed within some undisclosed timeframe? Without addressing me by name or mentioning any tracking or reference number for the parcel? I mean, I'm not saying it isn't possible, but certainly unlikely and it does raise one or the other red flag, so I'm erring on the side of caution here. Also, googling that number returns a plethora of scam warnings, so there's that. That being said, if your contact at EVGA insists on that SMS being legit, I'd be happy to fill out forms and pay whatever fee there is. Though a tracking code to cross-check would be nice to have in that case regardless.

Nah, don't be. Thank you for all your hard work and effort in organizing events like this, even going so far as to triple- and quadruple check to make sure that everyone get's their prizes instead of just informing the sponsors about the winners and calling it a day. You guys really go above and beyond, and that's greatly appreciated! So, again: Nothing to be sorry about, not at all.

IN Monsterkater