Curing diseases (Folding@Home) on PS3 vs PC?

[Capitalizt]

Just curious, has anyone calculated the stats to find out what type of PC the PS3 is comparable to when it comes to Folding@Home? I just discovered this program a few months ago and it feels great to be a part of potentially curing deadly diseases. I'm considering building a cheap i3 system (overclocked to 4ghz) to be dedicated exclusively to Folding@Home, but if the PS3 is significantly better than that, I may just grab an extra PS3 on Ebay and have it running full time instead.

If anyone here doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about, you can read up on the folding program (and get the PC version) here. http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

For information on how to run Folding@Home on your PS3, click here: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3#ntoc1

 

[EncryptedPrints]

I had read some time ago that when the PS3 came out it trumped most PC competition due to it's GPU and the purpose-built nature of the system (rendering big and complex things quickly).

Though I would imagine by now a good gaming PC could meet or beat it in terms of performance.

 

[Wapcaplet]

The PS3 does only 900 points per day, while a midrange NVIDIA card can do nearly 10,000 PPD (My GTX 460 is around 9500 PPD right now).

I imagine an i3 doing SMP folding will blow the PS3 out of the water. I've got a lowly Pentium E2180 at 3.1GHz that averages at least twice the PPD of a PS3.

 

[Capitalizt]

I read that the latest updates to the PS3 firmware + Folding program increased performance to around 1100-1200ppd. That's not too bad. I just grabbed a PS3 with a broken blu ray drive for $85 shipped on Ebay. That's roughly 1/3 what it would cost me to build a cheap dual core system to fold, so it seems like a pretty good value to me.