Having come back to BOINC and distributed computing in general, I've found my self wanting to take part in nothing but medical based projects. Unfortunately, being a student, I have very little to no income and rely on spare parts given to me by friends.

My system consists of a Core 2 Quad Q6600, a HD4850 and a 9800GT Eco/Green Edition. I understand GPUGRID only supports NVIDIA/CUDA capable cards, and having read some threads, a 9800GT doesn't seem to be a good card to run (something about some work units crashing?).

Another unfortunate thing is that my system is not always running - when at college or sleeping, I have to turn it off to save power, and with GPUGRIDs short dead lines, it may get a bit close at times.

At the moment, the 9800GT Eco is my primary graphics card and the HD4850 is - at the moment - dedicated to MilkyWay@Home (no medical BOINC project supports it. :( ). I'm tempted to swap the 9800GT Eco and HD4850 around so the 9800GT Eco is dedicated to GPUGRID whenever the system is on and the HD4850 will run Second Life (although at half the speed compared to the 9800GT Eco) and MilkyWay whenever Second Life isn't running.

However...is there much point in me doing this? I really wish I had a second NVIDIA/CUDA card dedicated to GPUGRID instead of the HD4850, but I have no income and most of the parts in my system have been given to me - except for the HD4850 that I actually had to sell my Nintendo DSi to get hold of. :(

I just really want to run this project along with World Community Grid / Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy...

You could also run folding@home on both cards.

I agree with skgiven. I've an 8800GT 256MB running Linux64 & it takes on average 21-22 hours to complete a WU, can't remember how long it took running Win7x64, but checked out another guy using a 9800GT who gets between 22-27 hours & I don't know if he keeps it running 24/7 like me. I hear it's even faster using XP. If the time awarded is 5 days, if you run it between 5-6 hours daily, you can get a WU done just in time. If you just keep track of how long you have it running & make sure that BOINC runs even though the PC is in use, then maybe an extra hour or two daily, to compensate for using your PC while running BOINC.
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I have a Green 9800GT and it takes about 14.5 hours to complete a task. If you can run about 3 hours per day, you should be good.

I'm currently running GPUGRID on a 9800 GT card (not sure exactly what company made it), with few problems. I leave this machine running nearly 24/7 though, partly to get the extra credit from returning workunits earlier than I would by running it daytime only. SOME of my GPUGRID workunits fail, but not enough to stop trying to run them.

I've seen elsewhere that the HD4nnn series cards are not likely to get a usable GPUGRID program anytime soon, though - something about problems with reaching global memory fast enough.

There is occasional early testing of a version for at least some HD5nnn series cards, but the results so far indicate that it still contains too many bugs likely to crash the system to release it for general GPUGRID use.

My 9800 GT card did take some extra effort to limit the number of GPUGRID workunits on my system at once, though, so that I COULD get the extra credit for returning workunits quickly. In case it makes a difference, my 9800 GT card is also my primary graphics card, but I don't make much use of it to watch videos or play games.

In university, I was able to get a few part-time jobs working for various parts of the university, so you might want to ask around about whether this is a possibility for you. If you can get any such jobs, you might check whether your PC has enough slots on the motherboard that you can replace the 9800 GT with two GT 240 cards when you can afford them - about the same speed, and about the same total power and cooling requirements, but capable of running two GPUGRID workunits at once instead of just one.

Most of the BOINC projects I'm interested in are those for medical research; I'm now participating in most of the BOINC projects I've found that look related to medical research, even if they're still in beta test or alpha test, as long as they're still offering workunits (a few aren't).

As for your World Community Grid settings, you may want to make sure that you've included the setting to download workunits from any of their other subprojects if your machine asks for a workunit and no Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy workunits are available.

You might want to check if your college offers any courses in computer languages that might let you offer programming help to the BOINC projects related to medical research. At the moment, the computer languages likely to help are C, C++, OpenCL, CUDA and one whose name I've forgotten but is specific to graphics cards with an ATI graphics chip. There's also one BOINC project related to medical research where Fortran would help, but rather tight restrictions on just which colleges or universities can even give you access to the source code.