Save money by Folding @Home (A DreamBuild PSA)

Hopefully, all y’all know what Folding @Home is, so I’m not going to go into detail about what it is, but for anyone out of the loop here’s a summary of it: Folding @Home is a program that once installed, uses spare CPU or GPU power to simulate protein folding, and then sends the information to a database in Stanford University which will help scientist better understand the role of proteins in diseases like Alzheimers, Huntington’s, various cancers, etc.  It’s a pretty utilitarian project, or at least it was, until EVGA decided to take things up a notch.  You see, with Folding @Home you can either give data as an individual, or join a team (such as EVGA’s) and donate as a team.  Not much comes from having a big team except bragging rights, bragging rights that EVGA seems to desperately want.  So desperately in fact that they are giving away “EVGA bucks” (Money that can be used to buy EVGA products from their website) and 10% off the b-stocks, which are better than the title suggests.  Want in on this action? Here’s the link http://www.evga.com/folding/promo.asp.  You’re gonna have to register with the EVGA website, and download the GPU version of Folding @Home.  There are some requirements: A CUDA-class GPU’s for NVIDIA (primarily G80 and later) and R6xx or later GPU’s for ATI, as well as WINDOWS (Ominous Music).  If you can play TF2 I think you should be okay in both of these categories, but maybe you should double check.

Guide to joining the EVGA Folding @Home Team: Link

Stanford University’s Foldin@Home website: http://folding.stanford.edu/

Stumble us.

We’re a simple website, with a simple goal.  Please, take a moment to stumble us.  It’s really simple, just click the button(You need to have a stumbe upon account, but you really should already have one).  As for a new post, I have been searching the web for news on some new hardware, but today seems pretty sparse.  Instead, I will probably just do a little post about some hardware that I wanna buy.  Hopefully it’ll be up soon.  If you guys find anything interesting – just comment it to us on any post, and we’ll get it.  Now, while your waiting for us to update, why not just click that little button at the top of this post?  Come on, you know you want to.

Google Auto-Pilot

Just an April-Fool’s Joke from my favorite Silicon Valley company.  I haven’t seen any other blogs cover this one yet, so I thought I’d post it up now.  If you have a Gmail account, and you definitely should, you should be able to see an advertisement for Google’s Auto-Pilot Service to the left of the login.  According to Google, this new service will ‘manage your inbox better than you can.’  This new service will automatically go through and respond to all those pesky emails that keep building up in your inbox.  There’s actually alot more than that, but I won’t spoil it for you here.  Hit up the link, and you can check it out for yourself *LINK*. On a side note, I lost the charger to my laptop (a lovely Sony Vaio) and so we might be a little slower in posts till I can get a charge back.

Gmail Auto Pilot: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html

Newegg.com is a god? (not to blaspheme)

OK, if you haven’t noticed, pretty much every one of our posts references Newegg.com. ‘Why is this so?’ you ask? Well, the answer is very simple: low prices, fast shipping, great RMA services and ‘eggselent’ customer service! I have been a devout customer for all of my years tinkering with computers, and have poured thousands of dollars straight into Newegg’s pockets throughout my computer building projects. I have never had a bad experience with the good people at Newegg, nor any product I bought from them.

A big plus in Newegg is that customers who have bought a product (let’s say… a graphics card) come back, weigh the pros and cons of the card, i.e. the core clock, memory amount and clock, etc. as well as the drivers available and the performance capabilities as compared to other cards (i.e. evga 260 vs 280, 260 vs 8800, etc…) so you know if you’re getting the best bang for your buck. Honestly, if by some chance, anyone from Newegg reads this, We here at DreamBuild HQ commend you for all of your hard work and dedication!

-Da DreamBuild Crew

HP Z800 (Another Xeon P.C.)

Inside the BMW-designed HP Z800

Remember those boss PCs with all that precious DDR3 RAM from a few posts ago?  (Too lazy to scroll down and refresh your memory? Well, we know how you feel so here’s the link) Now that you’re up to speed, let me introduce you to the HP z800, the newest Xeon processor based PC.  As a matter of fact, it has 2 quad core Xeon processors both running at a blistering 3.2Ghz!!!.  Again, not designed or intended for you or me (unless you happen to be a nuclear physicist, or a billionaire who loves computing) this baby is gonna attack your wallet, and leave it crying for mercy.  The People over at dvice.com estimate a packed one of these costing you up to $15,000.  That sounds reasonable to me, college is overrated anyways…  These start at $1999, and according to benchmarks (dvice.com)  they’re well worth it.

Great Deal

Newegg is easily my favorite Etail store.  Today they have a XFX Geforce GTX260 and a Seagate Barracuda 640GB Hard Drive for $200 (After a $30 mail in rebate).  Newegg is even throwing in a 4GB Flash drive to sweeten the deal.  Not that any of these things really belong in a Dream Build, they do fit very comfortably in a very respectable build.  Those GTX260s are more than capable for the hardcore crowd.  Given a shout out to SlickDeals.net for the heads up!

GTX260 + 640GB HDD + 4GB Flash Drive for $200.

Firefox Add-Ons

This is way off topic, but I love Firefox! I have been using it for about 4 years now, and it never ceases to amaze me. I just rediscovered add-ons, and they are slick! I just went on a downloading spree. Got Cooliris, TwitterFox, Fission, and the Status-bar Scientific Calculator. I also got “The Nethernet” which just sounded way to bad ass to pass up. Anyone out there have any suggestions for good add-ons, tell us about them in the comments.

10 Weirdest Products of CES

For you CES Junkies out thar.  Here is PC Mags picks for the weirdest gadgets of CES ’09.  All in all, they seem pretty standard to me – but it falls under the category of hardware (kinda) and so I thought I’d bring it to y’all.  My fav has to be the piss powered batteries. I got no more to say on this subject:

PCMag’s 10 Weirdest Products of CES