In the last post, the 8-core AMD FX-8320E was compared against the AMD Radeon 7970 in terms of both raw Folding@home computational performance and efficiency. It lost, although it is the best processor I’ve tested so far. It also turns out it is a very stable processor for overclocking.
Typical CPU overclocking focuses on raw performance only, and involves upping the clock frequency of the chip as well as the supplied voltage. When tuning for efficiency, doing more work for the same (or less) power is what is desired. In that frame of mind, I increased the clock rate of my FX-8320e without adjusting the voltage to try and find an improved efficiency point.
Overclocking Results
My FX-8320E proved to be very stable at stock voltage at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz. By very stable, I mean running Folding@home at max load on all CPUs for over 24 hours with no crashes, while also using the computer for daily tasks. This is a 400 MHz increase over the stock clock rate of 3.2 GHz. As expected, F@H production went up a noticeable amount (over 3000 PPD). Power consumption also increased slightly. It turns out the efficiency was also slightly higher (190 PPD/watt vs. 185 PPD/watt). So, overclocking was a success on all fronts.
Conclusion
As demonstrated with the AMD FX-8320e, mild overclocking can be a good way to earn more Points Per Day at a similar or greater efficiency than the stock clock rate. Small tweaks like this to Folding@home systems, if applied everywhere, could result in more disease research being done more efficiently.
Green Folding@Home 
If you are wanting efficient folding, you need to look at the current high-end NVidia GPUs.
GTX 1070 will fold about 600k PPD for under 200 watts power usage, the GX 1080 will fold around 700k PPD for right about 200 watts, but the king is the GTX 1080 ti that will fold over 1 MILLION PPD for under 300 watts (The Pascal-based Titan cards are in this same ballpark).
AMD does not compare well though the Vega MAY change that, and CPUs haven’t even been close for quite a few years now.
Great article!
Now interested in ppd on the 1050 or 1060 card with and without overclocking.
The GTX 1050 (non TI) with 2GB of ram does 133K PPD.
The GT 1030 does only about 40K PPD.
Really seems like the higher card, the better PPD/watts, however,
PPDs get bonus points for delivering folding work early.
It should be taken into account, that the higher end cards get more PPD, but may or may not have the same work done per Watt…