Unless you're talking about Shanghai or Nehalem where the number of cores may be an issue (Sao Paolo may have 2 6 core MCM'ed for a 12 core package, but then so may Nehalem). For current architectures, it depends on whether you plan to overclock aggressively. A Q6600 can easily do 3.2 ghz with air cooling (very,very good air cooling of course) - assuming you get the latest stepping (E0???) and 3.6ghz running 24/7 is not uncommon. Some of the Black Edition Phenoms can go to 3ghz or higher with the SB750 chipset, but it's still not clear how the new ACC feature affects oc'ing characteristics so it's not as straight forward as with the intel Q's and QX's.

If you're not going to overclock, then flops per cycle are not that different between Intel and AMD and AMD is, I believe, still a bit cheaper. AMD historically has had better latency for memory access due to it's built in memory control but I don't think this gives it an advantage over Intel when it comes to boinc.

I would go for the cheapest chip/mobo combination for a given stock speed and work from there. Intel's architecture I believe is a little more efficient for current offerings, so I think you would get your most bang for your buck with a Q6600 plus you will have room to oc later if you decide to do so (and you get an oc friendly mobo/bios). Or if you go with a Penryn like the Q9450, you'll get lower power consumption over AMD's phenoms. It's really a matter of weighing all of the factors that are important to you.

Good luck.

Robin

A quad is overkill for most desktop users, but they sure are fun! For crunching, it's all about the GHz and # of cores. FSB speed, RAM speed and timings are pretty much meaningless. This can also apply to many desktop apps as well. The FSB and RAM just arn't a bottleneck with the Core architecture.

I wouldn't invest big bucks in a quad system right now. Nehalem is mere months away. A Q6600 is still the best bang for the buck! The new 45nm quads are slightly faster(~10%) clock for clock and may run a bit cooler, but overclocking is extremely limited due to the low multiplier.

Apparently the price of quad cores are dropping -- I just bought a HP quad core, 6 Gig RAM, 720 Gig HD, 64-bit Vista Home Premium the other day at Best Buy for a little more than $800.00 USD. I wasn't looking for one when I went there but they had it on the shelf and I said to myself that I had to have one. Of course its overkill for a desktop, but I needed a new computer and that was it.

Now I'm looking for programs that can take advantage of all those cores.

Thanks. I forgot to mention that my mobo is Abit IP35-E, so this was valuable information. I read from some forum that NH-C12P gives some cooling for PWM, so that is one main reason I have thought about it. And in addition it has a great mounting system and good fan included.