damric

Right on. Can't have them falling apart. I'd like to see some more stuff like maybe drink coolers, mouse pads, and embroidered patch

What happened to the t-shirts?

The format of the original post really looks spot-on. I originally just wanted @firedfly to post this month's foldathon as a small training exercise, but he really nailed it. It goes to show you what a fresh set of eyes can do. There's more coming though. With the help of @iamjanco will will keep polishing the format. I really appreciate you guys. Second order of business, I shall be donating a prize from the EHW merch store. It will again be a random draw prize, 5WU minimum, winner's choice of ball cap, or coaster+mug. See the "I'm representing thread" for some real images of the EHW swag.

@ENTERPRISE when are the t-shirts coming back?

Yes now that's EXTREME

I swear LEDs need to become standardized. That crap drives me crazy with all the pin-outs and proprietary connectors.

The nice stickers that @Fluxmaven printed up a while back. Very good quality.

@JosephStewartPE you would like this game dude

What are they?

Looks good

This is awesome Count me out on prizes, but I think my favorite is Odyssey. I haven't personally played any yet but @mmcdonald12 plays them all on our TV and I watch. I just bought her Mirage a few days ago and it does look very cool. But yeah I like watching her play Odyssey the most because she gets herself into seemingly unwinnable battles and does some crazy guerilla tactics to victory.

We already do that with the smaller monthly foldathons. I guess if sponsors don't pan out like last time then we could consider that.

This was discussed last time (in the planning committee) and @ENTERPRISE explained the reasons we won't do that. But...what if we only drew prizes for gold/silver/bronze membership? Even if they only did the membership for 1 month it would generate about the same revenue as charging $10 per ticket and people might like that better since it has added perks. Plus obviously some people would keep paying the subscription if they liked it. What you think @Avacado

Yeah the seller played dumb like he didn't know the difference but agreed to partial refund. I powered this card up today. Voltage caps at like 1130 or something weak and the clock speed barely made it over 1000MHz so blah. @Bastiaan_NL @Avacado you guys hard modding these?

What's crazy is this looks like a brand new card. I'm going to install it today and see what's up with it.

Card just got here. I immediately checked the back and it's a damn vanilla version and NOT TOP as advertised

Someone else could enter you on your behalf?

Loving this feedback. Keep it coming.

Yeah I know a lot of people are like "pay to play, what?" If this was suggested last year I probably would have been in the HELL NO camp, myself. I knew there could be incidental expenses but they were much more than what I estimated. If you are curious you can pm me but I won't discuss the exact details here. So $10 entry ticket seems like the most reasonable way to do this, least amount of headache for everyone involved. I would envision that it is in the form of a donation to the site that @ENTERPRISE would keep safe. Myself and the other staff would get reimbursed after completion, and any remaining leftover funds would be donated to running this site. But out of curiosity, in the interest of really fundraising for the site, what if we set the entry fee to $20? That would actually be a very effective annual fundraiser. Just a thought, and I wouldn't even think of raising it higher than that.

I am finishing up my benchmarks on this card today, then I think I will list it for sale in the forums. You can get these for about $70 on ebay, so mine will be $50 and I will include the universal GPU block and 120mm fan adaptor. This was one of the more challenging projects I have completed. First the stock cooler had to be modified since it is a fanless design only meant for low clock speeds. I feel like someone could make it even better by adding more cooling to the back side VRMs. Speaking of which, the VRMs are underpowered on this card compared to other Vega 56/64 and they run very hot, so at least a fan is needed to point at the back of the card at the socket area. Then the card needed a firmware flash to make the mini-display port usable. I chose the WX9100 BIOS, but there are other options depending on what exactly you want to do with it. Then I had to find the right drivers. There's multiple options there. Then lastly to overclock it I used OverdriveNtool and an old version of Sapphire Trixx. I pulled a bunch of hardware gold cups, but one benchmark just wouldn't run without crash and that was 3Dmark Ice Storm EXTREME. I have no idea what's up with that particular bench, but I tried all kinds of things and I think it was something to do with low power states but I could not figure it out. But that's it, I think I'm done with it. Probably still a good card for AI or descent if tuned for folding in the 100W range. I know some people try and game on this card since it's 16GB but I think there's easier options for that performance level.

Ok so here's the one hopefully not too controversial idea that I have that would spare one or two of us from getting stuck with the bill like last time. Entry donation to be eligible for prizes, sort of like a raffle. We had around 75 people come fold with us at the last event. Hypothetically if we get the same amount of people next year, and most of them donated $10 to the site as an entry fee, we could use that to cover our expenses and we should slightly more than break even. Obviously we wouldn't require it just to participate, but just to be part of the random prize draw. If you remember, we had something like 50 very good random prizes we gave away last time. If we get even more interest for the next event, this could also end up being a bit of a small fundraiser for the site, so please consider.

I think everyone agrees that the inaugural 2023 event we had back in March was a success. We had a few hiccups along the way, and we want the community's feedback on how we can manage the next event to make it even better. Post your ideas in this thread, and the planning committee will seriously consider all input for the 2024 event. Some concerns of my own: 1) We ran into trouble with import duties/tariffs on the prizes for Canada, which caused some of us some significant personal expense to get those ransoms paid and get the prizes delivered. We also had some shipping expenses for one vendor that sent one of us a big prize box and had us distribute it ourselves. We can't really control how our prize vendors operate. We were actually quite blessed with the sheer amount of merchandise they donated. I have my own idea to help alleviate the burden of incidental costs associated with running the contest, and I'll post that below. 2) Was 96 hours the right amount of time for the challenge? 96 hours is pretty brutal when you are folding on every machine in the house, but some people said they are open to a longer challenge, possibly a week or 10 days. Personally I have mixed feelings towards that, but I am curious to see what the community thinks. 3) I want the event to be about 3 weeks sooner than last year, which would put it towards the end of February. Would that be cool?

First thing I would do is try and clone those drives externally to new drives, just in case it's the drives dying. There's an nvme cloning kit on amazon for dirt cheap. But it sounds like something screwy with the South Bridge chip. They run really hot on AM4 already and that might make them more prone to fail.

I'm not sure about the voltages. I can't seem to read them. I tried those 3rd part drivers but failed to get them to work right so I went back to older crimson drivers. I did get a time spy benched today while sustaining around 1670MHz. That was using overdriventool and trixx to push the power limit to +100%. At one point I had it at 1700MHz while testing but it was hit or miss on whether or not Time Spy loads would crash on start. If I can get it to start the bench, it's fine. Maybe I need to back the HBM off since I had it at 1GHz. I'll play around more tomorrow.

Alrighty I finally got a chance to work on this again after having to put it on the shelf for a while during the Team Cup. Looks like TRIXX allows higher clocks via higher power limits, but it's a bit sketchy on whether it will crash or not once I apply. If the bench can start, it runs flawlessly though.