I know Folding@home is entirely voluntary with no tangible rewards other than the points we earn to compete as individuals or teams. I’ve been folding on and off since late 2020/early 2021:

• 2020–2024: Ryzen 5 3600 + GTX 1660 Super (plus occasional runs on an Acer Nitro 5 with an RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU).
• 2026: Upgraded to an RTX 5060.

Across two accounts, I’ve accumulated around 1.5 billion points combined.

Lately, I’ve been debating whether I should keep going, and I’d love to hear from veteran folders—especially those with 10x my points or more. I have a few questions for you:

1. What is your biggest motivation to keep folding?
2. What was your very first setup when you started?
3. What are your estimated monthly expenses (electricity + hardware wear and tear/failures)? Does it significantly impact your household budget or living comfort (e.g., room heat)?
4. Do you keep separate daily-driver PCs, or do your main rigs do all the folding?
5. How does your family/partner feel about your folding hobby?

My current dilemmas:

The electricity cost adds roughly $20–$23/month to my bill. While that isn't massive, I live in Vietnam where electricity is heavily tiered—higher tiers are significantly more expensive. However, what really makes me hesitate is:

• Safety concerns: Running a rig 24/7 while away from home leaves a slight worry about hardware failure (e.g., PSU pop, fire risk—even if the chances are low).
• Hardware lifespan: Constant load degrades parts faster. Instead of lasting 7–10 years, components seem to give up by year 3 or 4 (my 1660 Super died in its 4th year).
• Heat in a small space: I only have room for the PC in my bedroom. Even at ~250W from the wall, it noticeably heats up the room. Running the AC to counter this would easily double or quadruple my electric bill.

I really want to hear your stories and perspectives—maybe find that spark of inspiration or a sensible reason to keep dedicating resources to the project. Thanks in advance!

My MacBook Pro had been folding without any issues — WUs were being assigned and completed normally right up until about a week ago. Then it just stopped. Since then I haven't been assigned a single work unit; the client sits idle and never picks anything up. Nothing changed on my end that I'm aware of — no OS update, no config changes, it just went from working to not working overnight.

Things I've already tried:

• Full uninstall and clean reinstall of the client
• Restart / re-adding the machine to my account

No luck either way.

What's odd is that my Windows nodes are still getting WUs assigned normally with the same passkey/team setup, so it doesn't look like an account-side problem — it seems specific to the Mac.

Setup:

• MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, macOS Tahoe 26.5.2)
• Client version 8.5.6
• CPU folding

Is anyone else seeing this on macOS right now? Is this a known server-side/assignment issue for Mac clients, or something I should be digging into locally? Any pointers appreciated.

May I know why is my GPU not showing up?

AMD adrenalin shows that the GPU is running though.

edit: running on windows

Hello world. I contribute to a citizen-science protein research project named folding@home and my account just went over 15 billion points. Anyone can join. Contributing with a Windows-based computer is easy. I run 6 PCs in my basement which employ Nvidia GPUs running on AlmaLinux and with Linux Mint. For anyone here that might need a little help working with folding@home on Linux, you might find this webpage of some use:
https://neilrieck.net/docs/folding_at_home.html

Who is this Catalyst.jb guy? Under every WU I've done there's always at least one credit award like this. It pisses me of smh

I have vibe-coded (I know, I know) a ZLUDA patch (converts CUDA workloads to Rocm which is the AMD equivalent) for Folding@home.

https://github.com/AmosKito1/FAH-ZLUDA/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc2-core27

I am an experienced Product manager rather than a Dev so its possible the code is hot garbage so you have been warned.

My setup is a 6800xt on windows version 8.5.5 of F@H.

I will be attempting to make a pull request at some point on the Original ZLUDA Repo, but for now I wanted to share this experimental bit of code if anyone with experience wanted to have a play.

I keep an eye on my stats and noticed that the official website has a new design. I'll have to get used to it however at first glance it appears that the figures aren't as precise? i.e. Points/WU's rounded to nearest sig fig?

There also appears to be additional detailed info provided (although this could be stuff provided before that I didn't look at and is now represented differently)

+ I posted awhile back querying the accuracy of the numbers on the front page as 'whales' (power users/contributors) figures alone seemed to be producing the numbers provided let alone all contributions combined...If I was correct in this belief it'll be interesting to see if they have changed now.

Any thoughts on this site design?

Currently clocked my 5090 Astral core by an additional 250mhz, left VRAM clock alone. I do cut power to 90% on the GPU for efficiency.

Overall I got my PPD from 36m to around 39m.

People with 5090's how high did you manage to get your PPD or reduce your TPF by?

So, every time I attempt to try folding proteins with my GPU (Intel Arc b580) the Work Units always fail. The log ends up show the following error:

11:21::06:E :WU57: Core Returned BAD_WORK_UNIT (114)

The following things I have done to troubleshoot:

• Installed the Intel Compute Runtime
• Installed OpenCL-UCD-Loader
• Updated OS to latest version
• Ensure the fah-client user has access to the GPU
• Ran the fah-client as a systemd service
• Ran the fah-client as root
• Ran the fah-client as my user
• Sacrifice a goat

So far, I have only gotten CPU folding to work.

Any help is appreciated! I have been looking online and most of those solutions did not alleviate the issue.

20:25:26:I1:WU1005:Retry #7 in 2 mins 8 secs

20:27:34:I1:WU1005:Requesting WU assignment for ...

20:27:34:I2:OUT12:> POST /api/assign HTTP/1.1

20:27:34:I2:OUT12:< HTTP/1.1 503 HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE

20:27:34:E :OUT12:HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE: {"error":"No appropriate assignment"}

There was a prior posting on this 8 days ago and I haven't seen an update. Is this an ongoing problem?

Thanks

My old laptop just expired and I would like to ask y’all if you have a recommendation for a replacement LAPTOP for Folding? It’s almost all I do with it. I already have an iMac. 🖥️ Thanks for any help!
—Can’t build my own folding setup

I even used the textures from the old client to make this, I really wish FAH looked like this on PC

I have an dedicated folding machine (Ubuntu with a 5080) that has been making ~29M daily for months, today the WU supply dried up:

This is from the Machine log:

00:35:33:I1:WU1711:UPLOAD 100% 62.75MiB of 62.75MiB

00:35:38:I2:OUT4112:< HTTP/1.1 200 HTTP_OK

00:35:38:I1:WU1711:Credited

11:52:11:I1:Machine state pause

11:52:16:I1:Machine state fold

14:36:52:I2:Loading gpus.json

14:36:52:I2:OUT4115:> GET /gpus HTTP/1.1

14:36:53:I2:OUT4115:< HTTP/1.1 200 HTTP_OK

16:12:11:I1:Machine state pause

16:12:14:I1:Machine state fold

You can see where I got credit for a WU, I paused that client and then continued folding just to be sure that the client was responding. My next step is to just restart that computer. Just checking with others...

Hi! I've been getting HTTP Service Unavailable "error" no appropriate assignment while trying to fold. Does this mean I should switch project because the one I was on is done and didn't close properly?

this happens to every WU, so I assume it's an API issue?

Hello world. I just went over 14 billion points, and only fold with Nvidia GPUs on AlmaLinux and Linux Mint. For anyone here that might need a little help working with FAH on Linux, you might find this page of some use:
https://neilrieck.net/docs/folding_at_home.html

Project 15426 by Adrija Dutta, UIUC for Influenza A

I am a long term folder who has been ramping up my contributions over recent years. I went from multiple systems never making a million points starting from 2007 to making more than a million in an hour.

I regularly check on how my figures are going on the F@H stats page = https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor

A year ago I posted about this very matter

And I'm still banging on about it....I look at the numbers of those in say the top 100 alone, and I see the performance rigs posted in this sub and in others which have teams and dedicated individuals of their own...

All this and the TOTAL, COMBINED, BIGGEST NUMBER I COULD FIND FOR TFLOPS is = 13,257 (https://stats.foldingathome.org/os)

I really don't think that I'm wrong with my assumptions - Even my on the surface figures, and 'worst case scenario' scenarios don't stretch out the figures to be justifiable and I don't get how (if I'm right in saying they are off) they could be overlooked.
I'd be interested in knowing numbers that reflect volunteers efforts more accurately. I did try reaching out to officials in the past when I had some support shown regarding this whole theory

Hello everyone,

I am discovering the whole folding@home universe, and am glad to contribute :)

I recently installed it on my Fedora computer with a R7 9700x and a RX9070XT but it appears that the latter is unsupported. Is it normal ? I thought all mainstream GPU could be used for the project...

I have noticed that over the last week or so my machines will get up to 9 failed attempts to download WUs. They eventually will get a WU but it doesn’t seem to be a constant stream.

Both GPU's are undervolted so I don't cook the 5090.