The standard setup equipment is:

Case is Lancool K62. It is an extremely well ventilated case and very quiet, with excellent amortization for HDD's. Very well designed interior for fast assembly and disassembly. JUPITER and URANUS have Coolmaster Cosmos 1000 cases.

Power Supply is Thermaltake Toughpower 850 Watts from XT series.

Mainboard is ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 (X58-1366). JUPITER has an ASUS Rampage II Extreme. These mainboards have excellent and very reliable features to play with overclocking to extract the most of your CPU and Memory.

CPU is Core i7 950, but also 920 ond 975. All devices are overclocked to various extents for CPU and Memory, on the basis of their core temps as memory and mainboard can follow up until thermal limit of CPU is reached which I avoid largely.

CPU are air cooled with ASUS Triton88 or Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev2.

Memory is Patriot 6GB DDR3 PC12800 (1600Mhz). JUPITER has 2000 Mhz version with 12GB and URANUS has 12 GB too.

Harddisk is a SATA Western Digital Velociraptor 300MB. Some have 150GB Velociraptors combined with other HDD from previous rigs I built.

CD/DVD Reader/Writer is SATA either Liteon or LG.

Wireless is a Belkin N+ USB stick

GPU are variable, new ones and others cannibalized from older rigs. They are all from ASUS and you have: MATRIX(GTX285), GTX280, GTX275, GTX260, GTS250, GT220, 9800 GX2. Matrix and the GTX 280 are on JUPITER and URANUS workstations that have also other usages. For those on the machines that crunch only WCG 24/7 their full potential is not used at the moment. Hope WCG will soon move to GPU computing.

OS is W7 64bit Ultimate.

Due to the variants and to the fact that some equipment has been recovered from other rigs it is difficult to set up an exact price but if you consider standard a machine with i7 950, GTS250 GPU, and 6GB 1600Mhz DDR3 you get around 2'500 CHF or 1'700 Euro per machine brand new, an excellent machine indeed.

My unique display is a pretty old LCD 19" remaining from an older rig.

I set a new daily record yesterday for my solar system with 268'172 points and 363 results validated.
A daily 300'000 points and 400 results seems within reach with FAAH.

I plan to switch to HCC after Sapphire on FAAH. I will then be able to compare.
I have not squeezed everything out of my system. Still three devices will get new heatsinks on their CPU which will allow at least 300-400 Mhz more. One additional improvement I am looking for is to disable all tasks that are not useful and take some resources ex:
1) Stop the file antivirus checking, which runs constinuously in Kasperski and does a lot of disk acces. This is now already done.
2) Stop the Win 7 file indexing, which accesses disk and runs for no use for these crunching devices. This is to be done yet.

And there are more to look about. Small things taken alone but in the end they add up and more points and more results come out.

Ceres is the smallest planet (dwarf) in the Solar System.
Someone long time ago said that the first will become the last and viceversa.
For this very wise reason Ceres is the device that has switched to my first hexacore CPU the Intel i7 980X which is a 6 core/ 12 core HT at a stock frequency of 3.33 Ghz.

The former Ceres was running the i7 920 OC at 3.5 Ghz with 6 GB DDR3 RAM at 1.4 Ghz 8-8-8-24. Core temps were at 75C. Consumption at wall socket was 225 Watts. OS is W7 64bit. Boinc version 6.10.18.

The CPU comes with a new generation cooler of the vertical tower type. That is sure better than the old classical round flat type but is of no match at all with my Triton 88 from Asus. Nevertheless the thermal paste that is supplied in a syringe, has been developed by Intel together with Dow Corning for aerospace applications and is of ultra high thermal conductivity. I used it with my Triton 88.

Installation was a breeze. First is to load the latest BIOS version of the Asus P6TD Deluxe V2 X58 Mainboard (Vers. 901), then switch CPU's, remount cooler, fire it and there you go.

Boinc immediately made use of all 12 cores and downloaded new tasks to keep the 1 day buffer full.

I am now running Ceres at 4.00 Ghz / core and the RAM runs at 1.6Ghz.
Consumption at wall socket is 240 Watts. Now Core temps are simply incredible or unbelievable. I get 55C at 4.00Ghz. If this is true then this CPU is an absolute success.

It would mean I can push even more the clock but then power consumption and cost will rise. But as I am not convinced these are real temps I prefer to keep it at 4.00 Ghz for some days and see what happens in terms of reliability and performance.

I will now switch Mercury to the Hexacore (yes I have two chips on hand) but there I will run with RAM at 2.00 Ghz. It will be interesting to compare temps and points.

In fact converting 2 devices from 8 to 12 core is like adding a new 8 core machine with zero energy costs as you stay in the same power consumption enevelope. I run 240 Watts at 4.00Ghz. But if I compare at the same 3.5 or 3.6 I had before then I run even with a lower energy consumption then before. For sure the chips are expensive but they are quickly amortized if you crunch 24/7 as you get half a CPU at no running costs.

GIBA, I have no MSN, Facebook, etc... Nowhere to be found.
We can continue here if you wish.