The Phenom II is a good CPU that is a decent overclocker if you so desire. The included HSF will handle the heat of a moderate overclock if you have good air flow. If you want to get up near 4 GHz you'll need better cooling. I have 2 1055Ts that have been crunching along since they came out with no issues. One thing to check if you overclock is the CPU voltage. I don't know about MSI boards but Gigabyte boards tend to way overvolt the CPU if you use the auto voltage settings and just raise the FSB. Just an FYI.
Falconet was right about Linux. It will crunch faster than Windows. Up to twice as fast on HCC.
Good luck with your new machine.

This isn't exactly what you asked about, but in case it's useful: I built a machine around an AMD Phenom II X4 610e this past Jan. It's been crunching full tilt 24/7 ever since (only 4 jobs at a time since it's just a quad core). With just the standard cooling and no overclock, it stays at 39 C.

Phenoms seem to benefit a lot from 64-bit vs 32-bit tasks. I noticed this on mine during the recent beta test of the 64-bit C4CW WUs. Those of us who were seeing 15% and greater speedups with the 64-bit betas compared to the 32-bit regular WUs were all running Phenoms.

Hello Ballswinger
I've switched to AMD Phenom II x6 during the Autumn 2010, since the price of Intel-CPUs with similar computation power were too high for me. At the same time, the motherboard/socket backward compatibility is very interesting by AMD (no socket change every 9 months).
I operate currently two Phenom II x6, without overclocking. Here some comparisons, based on average boinc points earned per day:

• 4'100: Phenom II x6 1090T, 3.2 GHz, Ubuntu x64 LTS 10.04 (6 cores)
  
• 3'000: Phenom II x6 1055T, 2.8 GHz, Win XP Pro (6 cores)
  
• 2'900: double Xeon E5345, 2.33 GHz, Win XP Pro 64 (8 cores)
  
• 1'800: Intel Core2 Q9450, 2.66 GHz, Win XP Pro (4 cores)
  
• 1'600: Intel Core2 Q6600, 2.4 GHz, Win XP Pro (4 cores)

For information, my first host on WCG was a Pentium P4 HT bringing around 500 boinc points per day (2 cores). It crunched 3.75 years long and needed more electricity power than the Phenom II x6.
I plan to switch the 1055T to Ubuntu x64 LTS 10.04 since Windows is definitively not able to manage memory efficiently (4 DDDT2 WUs on WinXP = 3 GB RAM, 6 DDDT2 WUs on Ubuntu x64 = 1.3 GB RAM).
I can only recommend the use of Phenom II based hosts.
Cheers,
Yves
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PS: Additionally: with an appropriate CPU cooler, Phenom II based systems could be really quiet.

This thread piqued my interest a lot as I plan to build a phenom II system in the next few months too. At the moment, the 1090T is the most cost effective for me and I was also thinking about cooling issues.

I was intrigued to see that linux is much faster than windows for crunching.
My situation is that I am not very computer literate and changing to something to Linux would be a pain in the proverbials for me. However, I do leave my computers running 24/7 and want to maximise the throughput on them.
Is there anyway I can do the following...
1) Have boinc running through windows whilst I am at home/work?
2) Whilst not at work or home, reboot on linux to just crunch?

Would I need to install 2 copies of boinc or would they be able to share the same WUs?
Is there a way I could install Linux on say an 8GB usb and run from that?

I hope you understand what I am trying to achieve here.

Ballswinger, sorry for hijacking this thread.