[quote name='richierich']I thought the PS3 was a powerful folder? With your laptop, what are its specs? My laptop only has a T2300 1.66 Core Duo processor and 2 GB ram. It seems really slow at folding.[/quote]
It is. In terms of FLOPS, nothing except ATI GPUs can touch it. But Stanford varies the point structure slightly by the relative value of the work. The PS3 is very fast, but can only run a subset of the projects. They set the points baseline using the PS3, at 900ppd. The GPU client is WAY faster in terms of calculation speed, but can only run a VERY limited set of projects, so it gets like 25-75 points per work unit (which the top cards can do in 30-40 minutes, and the slower ones finish in a few hours). The SMP client, on the other hand, can run nearly every type of calculation they have and the machines are typically almost dedicated folding rigs (projects have a 3-4 day deadline, vs 90 days for a typical single-processor WU), so the points are artificially bumped.
A typical SMP WU is worth 1760 points. My desktop (E4300 oveclocked to 2.88Ghz, with 4GB of RAM) can crank those out about every 30-32 hours. The laptop is a T7250 (2.0Ghz, 2GB RAM), and it takes roughly 40 hours to do the same thing.
Make no mistake about it, the SMP WUs take a WHILE to complete. Based on your specs, I'd guess it'd take about two days to complete a WU, maybe a little longer because the CD isn't quite as fast as the C2D is. But even at two days, that's the same number of points as the PS3 puts out (~1800) over the same time period if both are folding nonstop. Watch your points when the laptop finally DOES turn in a work unit--I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I use the extremeoverclocking stats,
here's my summary page. If you see the 4/10/08 12pm update (bottom right) with 2,385 points, here's how that breaks down: 3 PS3s @ 125 points apiece, 1 uniprocessor @250 points, 1 SMP @1,760. Notice how the 3 PS3s have turned in 14 work units today (as of the time of this post), but they're not worth a whole lot (125pts ea). Then notice that between my 4 SMP boxes, only one WU has been returned, but it was worth a TON (the same as all the PS3 production from today combined), and one of the 4 uniprocessor clients returned just one WU (representing 2 days or so worth of work), worth just double what one of those quick PS3 WUs is.
There's a search box on the left that you can use to look up your own stats, and see how many points you get when your WUs are returned.