This is aimed at those who build or fix PCs, their own or others. I would like to know what your hardware failures have been so we know which brands are doing well and which components people should avoid. I will be collating at least two lists; One for top product failures and the other for top components that fail.

All you have to do is post a comment on this article with the hardware failures you have experienced along with the make of the devices that failed (no registration required), I’ll post the first one below so you know what to expect. Use a real email address so I can get back to you if you win and arrange the prize to be sent out. Please limit the failures to a maximum of 10.

The competition will run for at least 1 – 2 weeks (depending on how many people respond) but feel free to add your failures even after the prize has been claimed.

There are a few stipulations to this contest;
» I will only ship the prize to the UK, USA and most of Europe.
» You must detail at least one piece of hardware including the manufacturer.
» I need to get at least 100 people to respond to get anything meaningful, so if you can spread the word about the “competition” that would be great. Therefore;
» The winner cannot be announced until there are at least 100 respondents.

Good luck everyone and look out for the results.

Sticking with the folding@home client for now, currently there are around 20,000 GPU clients ‘folding’ producing around 2 Petaflops (2000 Teraflops) and we’ll assume for arguments sake that the average folder’s PC cost around £500, which is a little high as one can make a system capable of running the client for quite a bit less and I’m not counting montiors etc, but we’ll assume and average gamer. 20,000 x £500 = £10,000,000. Each Blue Gene/L (one of the top supercomputers around) hits around 6 Teraflops per rack each rack consisting of 1,024 dual core PowerPC based processors and cost (2004 data) around £1,000,000 each. Matching the price of the GPU folders Blue Gene/L racks thats only 10 racks pumping out 60 Teraflops, further; to reach 60 Teraflops with GPU folding the cost is around £300,000.

More to come on this, some of us have to sleep.