Folding Forum

Best thing I found so far, is buy an old Laptop, like eg a Thinkpad or some 2004 Vaio, with an express card slot.
I found several older dual core models for under $50 on ebay.
It appears there are Express Card to full size PCIE (1x speed) slots for sale for $50.

All you need then is a $15 external 12V power supply (10A limits to ~100W graphics cards), a graphics card of choice (usually GTX 1050 Ti or less), and duct tape or some box to sort it in.

Haven't tried one yet, but I have an old Vaio and will try next week when the express to PCIE adaptor comes in.

Folding stops on battery power; both PCs and Android.
On Android the battery needs to be fully charged.
Android stops without WIFI, on a PC you only need WIFI to up/download.

Yes it won't work on battery, as the expresscard slot doesn't provide enough power, which is why you need an extra power supply.
It's not really "on the go", but if you go to a public library, or a place with power, you can plug laptop and graphics card in, and leave it folding, while browsing or emailing (or whatever you do on the go), or if you work in an office or cubicle, and have enough desk space, you could fold @work too...(which is my case).

JimboPalmer wrote:Folding stops on battery power; both PCs and Android.
On Android the battery needs to be fully charged.
Android stops without WIFI, on a PC you only need WIFI to up/download.

Not quite true.

Ignoring the issue of powering an external card, you CAN fold on a laptop, but not for very long. (Like moving it from in the house to powered in your car and then back from the car to another building.)

As you say, Android must be fully charged and plugged in.

You can configure a laptop to use the battery, but of course it runs it down rather quickly. This works for CPU folding and on the very slow internal GPU (if your laptop has a supported internal GPU).

Well, the laptop will be mainly used as a bridge to control the GPU.
The one that's really folding is the GPU, while the laptop just merely sends the information to and back from the ExpressCard slot (to PCIE).
So I presume it won't be using that much power, since the GPU is powered by an external power brick.

Parts will arrive soon for my old dual core Sony Vaio. I hope they will work, because even on my slowest graphics card (the GT 1030) I get more PPD than on the 3 work PCs installed in my office together folding via NaCl.