Suggest to read the Chat Room where a couple of threads touch on the subject of mobo's and processors.... dreaming of a triple quad, or as movieman almost always refers to 'clovers'. That section is closed, so wait till monday/tuesday to post your additions or enquiry there. Who knows one day we get an actual "techies & tweakers" forum (@ sufficient demand AND real posting, which is a different thing). The real tweaker congregations are on team fora externally to WCG.

That said, there is no uniform solution as some jobs have a prevalence for the integer and others for the floating point.... at sufficient cycles it should make little difference. We cant run to the shop as the flavour of the month is iops and next months project is flops. Anyone running multi-projects is thus best served on a good balance.

2.1 cents from a technignoramus ;>)

Hello Dan Cottom,
All of our projects are heavy on floating point. Right now Core 2 rules, but I recently read an article benchmarking samples of the Athlon 64 done in 65 nanometers that said that even though they were slower than Core 2, they actually produced more work per watt.
The DC Zone ( http://forum.thedczone.com/ ) has a lot of crunchers from many projects who talk about hardware and software.

Lawrence

Q6600 all the way! They do use alot of power but when you divide the figure by 4 cores, it's really quite reasonable. I have 3 dual-core Opterons running at 2.8GHz and 2 Q6600's running at 3.2GHz. The quads smoke the Opterons in terms of the average time it takes to complete a WU. Were talking 1 to 2 hours difference per WU!

After the July 22 price drop, I plan on replacing my Opterons with quads. I think the perfect motherboard for a dedicated Q6600 cruncher would be the Asus P5K-VM. It overclocks like crazy, has onboard video and is fairly cheap. I'm also going to replace all the hard drives with USB flash drives to cut down on heat, noise and power consumption. I tried it on one system already, works perfectly! :)

I'm using a 1GB flash drive, it's been running for a couple weeks now with no problems. Write delay is set to 999 seconds and VM is turned off. Don't ask me how it still works with no VM but it does. The OS is a cut down version of XP that only takes up around 200MB, so even a 256MB drive can be used. Boot-up is slow at around 3 minutes but BOINC benchmarks are very comparable to using a regular hard drive. I too am concerned about the longevity of a flash drive with this kind of use so I'm going to let this one run for another month or so before converting the rest.

I've always been intrigued with RAM drives and now with 2GB sticks of RAM on the market for a reasonable price they may become more popular. I also eargerly await the arrival of solid state flash type hard drives. Zero noise, low power consumption and fast access times will be appreciated by most computer enthusiasts.