As has been said, if you use BOINC, you can expect to average more points per day. BOINC has a different way of awarding points than the UD Grid Agent. With the Grid Agent, when a work unit is completed, a short CPU benchmark is run on your system. The result of that benchmark is used to award points for the just completed work unit immediately. There is a bit of a flaw here in that the benchmark is influenced by whatever you are running at the moment and, if you happen to be running something CPU intensive at that moment, fewer points will be awarded. BOINC does not award points as the work unit is completed. Each work unit is sent to multiple users (usually 3) to insure that accurate results are produced (this prevents the results from inaccuracies due to things like processor errors from minor hardware bugs). When the results from all of the users that ran the work unit have been returned, they are averaged in some manner and the same number of points is awarded to each of the users that ran that work unit. This can be right away, or it can be several days later depending on how the users run their systems. If, for example, one is running on a laptop only when it is not on battery power, it might be several days after you have completed the work unit before he does and you will not see the points until then. If you are running WCG on only one system as I am right now, this will result in inconsistant daily totals (the past week, I have seen daily point totals vary between 1700 and 5000 points -- my average is about 3000 points).

Another thing comes into play as well, and this has more to do with why you are awarded more points while running BOINC. BOINC has its own scale for awarding points that is much lower than that of the UD Grid Agent. Because of this, the WCG multiplies the BOINC points by some number (that I've never seen published) in an attempt to scale them around what would have been awarded by the Grid Agent had the work unit been run on it. The number was arrived at through some testing that the WCG ran. From what many of us have seen, that multiplier results in more points being awarded for work run using BOINC. I think it may be as much as a third higher from my own experience.

I hope I haven't bored everyone to tears with this explanation, but, in a nutshell, you can expect to average more points with BOINC, but your daily totals will probably vary quite a bit.

Thanks for the link Dave