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.

1 hour ago, damric said:

There's always that guy

 

Usually it's @Fluxmaven 

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

On 04/10/2023 at 22:43, ENTERPRISE said:

Firstly, Psychology. People are generally put off by "Premium Subscriptions", those who are wanting to join the site on a hit and run basis (which is a surprising amount whenever prizes are up for grabs) are more likely to put in a one off $10 over the irrational fear of possibly being hooked into an unwanted subscription. Subscriptions are mostly taken after a user has spent a good amount of time integrating into the community, not those who first join. Hit and run users are IMHO unlikely to take up a subscription to a site they ultimately have no loyalty to.

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?

On 08/10/2023 at 09:35, ENTERPRISE said:

I really like the idea of users paying $10 if they choose to claim a prize, rather than paying $10 just for the chance to. 

 

That is a great idea!

Yup, that's a definite agree from me as well!

11 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

I personally don't have a problem with that although I think $20 might be discouraging to a lot of people. We had a fair amount of participation from members outside the site that in turn stuck around. Asking too much might turn away people that might otherwise be interested.

 

So saying we had around 75 people last year, that makes me think $10 is the sweet spot. Not everyone that participates is interested in prizes. And of those interested, many would be on the fence about an entry fee at all. $10 or less is pocket change. Above that I think you'll start scaring people off.

 

I wasn't aware that we incurred so much expense getting the prizes out last time. Regardless of what we end up setting it to, I'm willing to chip in a little extra if we come up short so it's not all falling on your shoulders. 

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: 

1 hour ago, bonami2 said:

I don't think people would pays. And that open a can of worm in many province / state country because asking money even if it not directly related is considered gambling in many place. Quebec as one of the worst law about gambling in the world. Lot of time price draw are Canada wide except Quebec.

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.

11 hours ago, UltraMega said:

When you turn PT on, most of the other graphics settings become irrelevant. Ambient occlusion, shadow quality settings, none of that matters with PT on.

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?

11 hours ago, UltraMega said:

It's disappointing that there is no quality settings at all for PT though, it's just on or off... which makes me think this is really just intended to serve as an Nvidia marketing ploy more than anything else.

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. 

45 minutes ago, damric said:

There might be a legitimate duty fee.

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.

14 minutes ago, Avacado said:

Sorry to everyone about the delays!

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

14 hours ago, Avacado said:

Is there anyone who won prizes that has not received one? Please let me know here or by PM. 

Yeah, I didn't receive my Z20 (or any parcel pre-notification via email)* yet.

Then again, AFAIK the keyboard I'm supposed to get has another layout and is shipped from EVGA's Taiwan warehouse, so I'm not really worried that it's taking a bit longer.

*What I did get, though, is a SMS from a French number telling me that there's some parcel for me awaiting customs clearance in Germany with the added threat of returning to sender if the fee isn't paid. No tracking number or anything along those lines, just a link to enter personal details.

Considering I'm neither French nor should the parcel have any business being in France, I took that SMS as a coincidentally timed phishing scam, so I blocked and reported the number.

TPU forgot to mention that TechQuickie is affected as well. Let's hope they get their channels back swiftly, tomorrow's WAN show is bound to be interesting.

Thanks everyone for your contribution to important science and thanks to the team for hosting this event!

I had a great time and am looking forward to the next competition.

7 hours ago, Avacado said:

Great job everyone, here are the competition prize winners. Video of the drawing is being uploaded and should be available in about an hour.  Please start to PM Name and address as per the guidance in the OP. 

 

@damric Seeing I won an EVGA keyboard, I just have to ask: Is it at all possible to get that with a German layout? That would make it an 811-W1-20DE-K2 instead of the 811-W1-20US-KR linked in the OP.

If that shouldn't be possible I'd like to forfeit my prize to someone who didn't win. 

9 hours ago, elblat said:

Team turned out almost a trillion yesterday, and very close to gaining another place today!

Just had a look - only 138M points shy of Arizona Research! 

Guess I'll just keep on folding then, we should be able to overtake them within a day or two 

2 minutes ago, Avacado said:

Very sorry about that. I will have to distribute the CM prizes myself, so shipping outside of the US will be very costly and could potentially be more than the products are worth. 

Don't be. I'm in this contest to further a good cause first and foremost, winning something would just be icing on the cake. 

12 hours ago, damric said:

We would also ask that you tell us your country

I'm from Germany, so no CM prizes for me I guess 

On 17/03/2023 at 16:55, damric said:

 

Glad you could join our family. Since you like it here, you may want to check out our HWBOT team, which also punches way above our weight.

 

We also have smaller monthly folding challenges (48 hours until end of fall).

 

And if you really feeling it, we have EXTREME TEAM folding (ETF league) where you are on a team, and each of you folds with 1 piece of hardware 24/7 with a handicap bonus based on the LARS data.

Thanks again for having me!

This might be a somewhat stupid question, but what exactly is HWBOT?  I never heard of it before and just had a quick look at their website, however I didn't really the point  Care to elaborate?

I'll gladly partake in at least some of those

ETF sounds really fun, however I'd need to source some dedicated folding hardware first. Currently I'm folding on SO's and mine gaming rigs, so nothing I could spare 24/7 unfortunately.

However, I'd love a DM with further information for future reference! 

2 hours ago, firedfly said:

 

What's the ppd on your 3080ti?  From my (limited) testing, the drop in ppd on a high end GPU was more than a CPU would make.  So, folding on GPU+CPU was less ppd than just GPU.

In my experience that depends on the specific combination:

SO's rig (10400F + 3070) for example has had quite the drop in PPD, so that 3070 is folding by itself with a light OC, netting about 5-5.5M PPD - depending on the project ofc - using 190 W on average since the start of this fold-a-thon.

My rig on the other hand - using a 13700KF with E-Cores disabled, P-Cores at 5.6 GHz, folding on 13/16 threads - in combination with a 4080, is actually profiting from CPU folding. GPU's making about 10.5-17.5M PPD (using 215 W on average since competition start), the CPU is contributing another 500-600K PPD while dropping the GPU's PPD by only about 100K. So it's still a net increase of about 500K PPD on average. That being said, the CPU alone is chugging back about 185 W avg, so it really isn't worth it efficiency-wise. Might be able to lower voltages somewhat, but I wasn't able to get it stable in time, so it is what it is I suppose. 

12 minutes ago, Avacado said:

Everyone loves coming on to the forums right?

Well, that's the problem right there, you see. I love visiting the forums so much, my ADHD kicks in and prevents me from getting actual work done 

12 minutes ago, CoolGTX said:

I was looking for that type of link earlier .... never found it in the thread

It was linked in the OP for some time, until it was changed to the embedded score card. I managed to find it in my browser history and thought I'd share  

Welcome btw, I'm quite new here as well. Found my way over from the LTT forums, by damrics invite to this event. So far I'm liking this community very much, everyone here seems pretty nice. Kinda like a family  

5 minutes ago, damric said:

Some folks have messaged me in the various places to tell me they will be arriving late today some time. That's perfectly OK. Better late to the party than never

Bring 'em on, the more the merrier!

2 hours ago, damric said:

moved the score card towards the top so you don't have to scroll through all the merchandise

Protip: Use the dedicated scoreboard website and don't even have to open the forums  

10 minutes ago, axipher said:

do you remember where you saw the note for hourly updates?

In the opening post of this thread at the very bottom (highlighting by me):  

On 21/02/2023 at 01:13, damric said:

Note: Stats are updated every hour at XX:25 for previous hour of submitted Work Units.

Wow, I just noticed FAHViewer crashed sometime this night. Luckily it was just the viewer, still, without the viewer running my GPU just sits there marginally above idle speed, showing Util limit and folding at only 30-35% capacity 

Well, it's fixed now and I'll have an extra eye on it in the following days. Still, I'm a bit mad I haven't caught it earlier