Nitteo, a forum user at overclock.net, has posted pictures of his 16 rigs with 51 Nvidia 8800 series cards used for Folding@home, a distributed computing project to simulate and record results of protein folding. If proteins do not fold correctly, cancerous cells and other diseases result. Thus, understanding how proteins fold may eventually lead to the development of cures for diseases caused by protein misfolding.

We thank Nitteo for building and donating CPU/GPU power to help with research that can potentially lead to cures one day. Come to think of it, his electric bill is probably through the roof.

For more pictures and info, visit www.overclock.net.

The new Nvidia forceware 180 drivers are to be released in September, and with the built-up hype Nvidia took the liberty to name it the “Big Bang 2.”  (”Big Bang” was first used for a big release in the Geforce 6000 series.)

Forceware 180 will bring new features such as:

• Multimonitor support for SLI
• Display Port support
• OpenGL 3.0
• Hardware video transcoding
• GPU PhysX support
• Performance optimizations

PhysX support will bring Geforce 8000 and 9000 users the opportunity to run a different card in SLI.  One can be used to do physics calculations while another can be used to run the graphics portion.

Prices are dropping as the competition between AMD and Nvidia heats up.  If you are in the market for a new graphics card, consider waiting a bit and letting the prices even fall further.

via Ars Technica