[drupal=638]Competition: The TBCS Folding@Home Team[/drupal]
Hello and welcome to another TBCS competition. This time we're going to use a little hardware goodness to try to push all of you computing maniacs to donate all those spare CPU/GPU cycles to a good cause. Thermaltake have stepped up to the plate to offer a prize for the winner in the form of one of the new Azurues gaming mice with a $50 value.
Here at TBCS it's always nice to see people do something for a good cause. We had a truly awesome turnout for our recent fundraising effort for partylikearockstar, so we already know how great you guys can be when it comes to putting in that little extra effort for someone in need.
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which aims to use computers all over the world to simulate protein folding, all of which, in it's own way, can contribute to potentially world-changing medical and scientific research, and the best thing about it, is that it can effectively work in the background of your computer only using that power which you aren't already using for something else.
TBCS has it's own official folding@home team, specifically team number 191053 and we want your CPU and GPU cycles to push our team even further up the ranking tables. Since we started, we've already completed over 5500 work units for a total score well in excess of 4,000,000 points and now we want, with Thermaltakes help, to give you guys the chance to get something back for your time, effort, and power bill!
This competition is going to be a random draw type of affair. Team members will be able to qualify for up to 7 entries in the draw, and at the end of the 4 week period for which we'll be running the competition, a single winner will be drawn "out of the hat" and will recieve an Azurues Optical Gaming Mouse, courtesy of Thermaltake.
The Azurues Optical Gaming Mouse features, among other things, removable weights, rubber coating, up to 1600dpi sensitivity, a low-friction base, a braided cable with a full speed USB connection, topped off with some subtle illumination. Rest assured, this is NOT your average $5 mouse :D
The rules are fairly simple, and the competition has been designed to give pretty much anyone a chance at winning, while still showing a little extra appreciation to those members who are really churning out high numbers.
How to "earn" entries in the draw....
If you produce a single workunit at any point in the 4 weeks of the competition, you will earn one entry into the draw.
You will also receive an additional entry for each week in which you produce 5 or more workunits.
Finally you will receive an additional two entries if you produce over 100,000 points during the full competition period.
Now for the rules....
- You must be a member of the TBCS forums.
- You must notify slaveofconvention if your folding username differs notably from your forum username.
- If you want to have friends and or family fold for you, by all means go ahead but they MUST use YOUR folding username - saying "Oh by the way, this user was actually folding for me" will not matter.
- For the purposes of tracking and qualification, the only acceptable proof of production is going to be the individual statistics provided by the Extreme Overclocking page (see, there was a good reason I was pushing so hard to get us into the top 1200).
- This competition will run from Midnight on 30th April/1st May until Midnight on 28th/29th May based on the times used by the Extreme Overclocking page.
- There is NO previous folding requirement, so even if you haven't folded for TBCS in the past, you can still qualify for all seven chances to win.
- As is the norm in TBCS competitions, this is NOT open to members of staff.
- Finally, because the prize isn't going to cost a small fortune to ship, we're pleased to announce that this competition is open to everyone irrespective of location. (well ok, we DO require that you be a resident of the planet Earth, but that isn't asking too much, is it?)
For those of you not familiar with the Extreme Overclocking page, you can find it here
The stats we'll be watching are those under "weekly production" at the bottom of the page of individual stats as produced by Extreme Overclocking. If you want to check yours out, this is the set of stats in question....
You could potentially have as many as 7 entries in the draw if you're one of our power-producers. At the same time, we have also taken the time to make sure that those of you with lower powered machines will still have a real chance at a prize.
100,000 points may seem like a lot, but bearing in mind we're running this competition over a 4 week period, that only equates to a ppd of 3572 which is within the reach of most modern computers. The 5 workunit qualification should be within reach of pretty much everyone, especially when you bear in mind that there is no rule stating that you can only have the folding software running on a single PC.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the forums or my sending slaveofconvention a PM and he'll get an answer to you as quickly as possible.