nintendoeats

@mirado: That's one part of it, but the other is that Nvidia cards are better for folding than ATi. My old card was a 7970 and that would do a bit over 100k a day. I replaced it with a 1060 which isn't that much better for games but nearly quadrupled my folding output. In any case, welcome!

@leyledorp: Winter is coming, you should huddle up with us. Welcome! What are you running?

@hobbz: Nooooooooooo!

@hobbz: In the meantime, It's giving me a chance to increase my lead. You are coming uncomfortably close to me.

@hobbz: Totally reasonable. I should have mentioned it here. I assumed the word got out, which in retrospect was a silly thing to believe.

@hobbz: Check out who started that thread.

I don't know much about working with video, but I would expect any modern compressor to be fine. The current version of LAME is what I use to make MP3s, I don't know if that applies to video as well. I'm sorry that I can't be much more help than that. When in doubt, don't convert.

To bit-rate: It is now possible to rip 128kbps MP3s which are indistinguishable from uncompressed audio virtually all of the time, on all equipment and to all people. That's 64kbps per track so for 5.1 we can break it down to 6 * 64 = 384kbps. So that's a good minimum. The problem is that many files over the years have been made with rubbish compressors, and that may well include your favourite movie. I would expect any modern blu-ray release to have the best quality audio that a human can discern, since bit-rates for them well exceed 64kbps per track. For video obtained from unknown sources, I would err on the higher the better because it can be tough to say how effective the encoder they used was.

The most important factor is speakers, since they introduce far more distortion and frequency bias than any other part of the chain (by an order of magnitude). After that comes room acoustics. As long as the amp has sufficiently low distortion and noise characteristics, you really just need to make sure that it has sufficient voltage and current handling for your speakers. The race to higher bit rates and depths is a way to sell more DACs, it has no real bearing on what you actually hear. Unforunately, speakers and acoustic treatments are the most expensive things in audio. However, they are also the best investment because the other stuff doesn't matter above a base level of quality that you can reach very quickly.

@flashflood_29: The top 100 itself is a pretty serious goal, but yeah that would be excellent. It would be nice if we could be stickied. I'm not really active on GB anymore so I don't even know who to ask, do you?

Stanford just began posting monthly leaderboards. Some teams are pulling in 2 billion points a month. Clearly we need to step up our game...somehow...

http://folding.stanford.edu/stats/