Folding@Home

Creator: Stanford University

Folding@home is possibly the most successful GPGPU application at the moment, with ATI pioneering GPU-based folding years ago with its Radeon X1000 range of GPUs. Since then, folding has spread to the point where Nvidia has supported folding on all GPUs since its GeForce 8-series.

Folding is a client-based distributed computing application that simulates protein folding to aid our understanding of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow Disease (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. To add some interest to the furthering of scientific and medical research doesn't hold any interest for you, Stanford also has team- and user-based leaderboards, so folding is also a competition.

To fold on your GPU, visit the High Performance Client page and download the latest version. The client downloads work units (aka 'projects') from Stanford, and each work unit is worth a certain amount of points.

You can monitor your folding progress via the FahMon tool, which will calculate how quickly your card can get through the current work unit and extrapolates a points per day (ppd) figure. You can join the bit-tech and Custom PC folding team (currently ranked fifth in the world) by using the team number 35947. Your contribution is valued.


We know the GTX 275 to be a very capable card when it comes to folding, and the iChill certainly shows that that's still the case. Because different folding tasks utilise the GPU in different ways though, it's very difficult to get a truly accurate PPD figure. Needless to say though that if Folding is your thing, the GTX 275 is a worthy choice.

Power Consumption

Again, differences in GPU utilisation from the specific Folding@home task, as well as the individual quality of GPU used in the card, cause differences in the iChill's power consumption. As the card uses the identical power circuitry of a stock GTX 275, the increase in Folding power consumption has to have come from a more innocuous source.