Whatever people are saying about the HD2900XT... You just know that it will rock when it comes to folding@home.

A single crossfire rig is going to be able to post over 1Tflop, man this is super computer type power from only 10 years ago - http://www.sandia.gov/ASCI/Red/ - this amount of power!!!!!

I think they are gonna get better with time/newer drivers.

Right. Because there are thousands of people lined up to by two 2900XT's just so they can process more folding@home crapola. And is it just me or has that project wasted more energy, time, and cycles all for nothing? It's a bit like seti@home: useless.

well for your information. 2900T does 496 gflops and 8800GTX does 520 gflops by the time it starts to rock. nvidia 8900 series will already by rocking

SETI@home seems to be a waste, there's been no proven lifeforms outside of earth. However, folding@home may prove useful in understanding why protiens misfold, and help direct scientists and doctors to develop means to prevent it from happening, or drug therapy's which will slow diseases like alzheimer's.

I some times wonder if there are any proven/intelligent
lifeforms on earth.

I don't get how the 2900xt has all the better numbers (i.e. shader operations, mem etc) Yet how come its not beating the 8800gtx? Hell it even has a better price. I don't get it. It must be the drivers, then again I already got a 8800gtx so I'm happy =P (except for nvidia's drivers)

i believe the gtx's shaders r clocked twice of what the 2900xt's shaders r. i guess when they start using 65nm the temp will drop and they can clock em higher and improve some of the things.

They already have the base F@H client working for the HD2900XT (not released to public yet, but soon), mhouston from the F@H dev team at stanford said about the performance;

Performance-wise, the 2900XT is 2.2X faster than R580 for the force calculation, but the surrounding kernels and the interaction with the CPU currently limit the speed up to 45% faster for the full client.
http://forum.folding-community.org [...] tml#185371

So it's looking good for F@H.

Just for your information, that's not achieveable on the stock G80Ultra even.

First, not even the GF8800Ultra can break 500gFlops despite everyone & nVidia promoting the 520 number by adding 100% efficiency of the extra MUL.

This has been known since launch;
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/reviews/1/11

Only with recent drivers have they broken 400Gflops, now into 470Gflops on 158s, but only in shader apps, not general stream computing, in order to break 500Gflops they needed to overclock the G80.

Will they even have a F@H client for the G80 family by then? Still nothing right now, so for James' situation it may still not be doing much yet.

Yes F@H should become the defacto benchmark for all new graphics cards, screw the rest.
We all buy $400+ cards to fold, isn't that what they are designed for?

I some times wonder if there are any proven/intelligent
lifeforms on earth.

There must be intelligent lifeforms on earth. I have an old Star Trek bookmarker that reads "1997-Klingons discover signs of intelligent life on earth". Of course, the whales had the intelligence not to get involved.

Hey some people like to use their computers down-time to fold (or search for ETs), how's that any less valid than 3Dmark for the people who try to boost their Bungholiomarks?

At least F@H is a positive contribution, even if the tangible results aren't that apparent;
http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html

I think the idea that we shouldn't bother because we haven't had any earth shattering results yet on SETI or F@H is a pretty sad comment, and speaks to the Great One's sentiment that 'You'all always miss 100% off the shots you don't take'.

If F@H with an mobile HD2600 can get me a simple work unit done in about 1-2 hours, I might start folding again on my laptops while I surf, the power increase will be marginal, and at least I can be sure of no fan failure etc while I'm surfing. I still wouldn't trust it while I sleep, but if it can cut down a WU time signficantly, then I'd feel I could get something else done while 70% of it was idle while I surf.

You must have missed the sarcasm of my last post.
I am in no way bashing F@H, I think it's great. I do not think F@H should be used to "bench" graphics cards. If F@H performance = good GPUs/CPUs than the PS3 really is a "supercomputer" (we alll know it isn't)

I have my HD2900xt and it's great. I also know some registry tweaks, I'm almost to 13,500 in 3dmark06. Seriously, this card is going to end up being just as powerful as a GTX, at least until you get way up in resolution, but hell I'm not dropping that kind of cash for a monitor!

I some times wonder if there are any proven/intelligent
lifeforms on earth.

There must be intelligent lifeforms on earth. I have an old Star Trek bookmarker that reads "1997-Klingons discover signs of intelligent life on earth". Of course, the whales had the intelligence not to get involved.

Damn whales, they betrayed us.

I caught it, but obviously missed the gist of it.
It seemed more of a 'who cares' sarcastic remark, and so if I misread it, that's my fault, and also the fault of the lack of sarcasm enhancers on the wbe.

Well I think it depends on your view of it, both ATi and nV are also pushing these a GPGPUs / StreamProcessors, and with regards to the PS3, you know that the X1950XT outperforms the PS3 already, eh? The HD2900 with that 43% boost should destroy the PS3 even more. The thing that made me laugh the other day was the InQ article about M$' missed opportunity with regards to F@H vis-a-vis the PS3;
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39508

While I understand for most people this is meaningless at best, and BS PR at worst, look at my F@H results in the Tom's team list from the time I still had my deskops, and you'll see I'm genuine about my interest, but I agree it's still not going to be a deal breaker or focus point for me, just a nice bonus (like a fingerprint reader).

And unlike the lack of support for the X1600 series, they are already talking about it for the HD2400 and HD2600 in that F@H thread above I linked to, so it's got me interested, especially since I'm already intrigued by a few aspect of the mobile version of the HD2600 already, I just hope it comes in something other than the HP Dragon and desktop replacements.

Damn whales, they betrayed us.

I'm still waiting for my transparent aluminium at my Rona / Home Despot.

Wonder how fast the cpu,s were on the enterprise? 8O
50ghz?

50ghz seems a little slow, more like 50thz centicores