Would be looking at about £2.5k to build one of similar spec to this one I'm re-purposing on Friday, to be honest (well, I'd be going with dual hex-core Xeon rather than dual quad-core that this one has).

Plus, if I was going down that route, I'd probably go with a tower-server to run at home, rather than a rack-mounted server to put in work, as then I could add some GPUs to it too, and have it as a monster-cruncher! That would bump the cost up a little more, though!

Congratulations to the following UK team members on achieving a personal milestone in the lunchtime update:

Maugan 6,000,000 Points

blackdog13 400 Results

fosking moves above 10,000 in the Results Rankings to #9,971

UK team midday crunch:

			                    	Hours				
RunTime		      0:186:12:52:54		4,465				
7day Avg		178.9		        4,288				
March		        186.6		        4,468				
February		181.0		        4,367		

 No. Of Members Active This Morning:								
				Total	        55	out of	97	
				Group 1    	36 	,,  ,,	38	
				Group 2    	 7	,,  ,,	13	
				Group 3    	10 	,,  ,,	26	
				Groups 4 & 5 	 2	,,  ,,	20	

A Rankings double today with advances in both RunTime and Points

In RunTime the UK team have passed Hungary to move to #79 It would appear that we've begun an unprecedented purple patch in the RunTime rankings with potentially a further 6 places to be gained in a little over 3 weeks:

RunTime		                                                    	     Days to close			
Name                            	Gap - days 	Net Crunch	Current	 Mar-13	 Dec-31	
IBM Australia                   	         57	      256	      0	      7	     88	
IBM Austin                      	      2,543	      282	      9	     15	    104	
SWARH                           	      6,165	      361	     17	     23	    114	
ek$i sozluk cpu power           	      3,920	      217	     18	     23	    132	
Finland                         	      4,368	      225	     19	     26	    126	
Ars Technica                    	      3,545	      163	     22	     26	    151	

In Points we've passed KAUST and move to #67 and potentially another 4 places to be gained before mid April:

Points		                                                    	     Days to close			
Name                            	Gap - pts. 	Net Crunch	Current	 Mar-13	 Dec-31	
Ubuntu Linux                    	  2,170,187	1,559,112	      1	      9	    371	
Crunching@EVGA                  	 13,784,763	2,566,583	      5	     14	  	
University of Texas at Dallas   	 39,728,757	3,114,464	     13	     19	    148	
BOINC Synergy                   	 38,359,264	1,714,834	     22	     28	    324	
Uni Illinois Urbana-Champaign   	124,877,784	3,114,464	     40	     45	    194	
University of Waterloo          	111,119,132	2,273,972	     49	     52	    288	
I.I.D.S.                        	482,905,650	1,213,231	    398	    378	  	

The loss of Thargor's dual quad core will undoubtedly slow things down but the majority of the hard work in closing the gap has been done.

New activity detected:

	 	 	 	 	 	                                                        Current RT Rk		
Name             	      Last Active		      Restarted		      RT since restart	Global	UK	 
badddger         	05:03:47	30/06/2010	21-03-13	10:09:25	0:000:00:00:00	45,321	67	

Some restarts are little more than an involuntary twitch. Whilst others. e.g. Maugan, make a substantial contribution to both the UK team and to WCG. I'll develop the format above into an ad hoc report to monitor progress.

Am thinking the much cheaper option would be to build my own single-CPU tower, using a non-Xeon CPU, and then rely more on the GPUs to do the work (an option which seems to be working very nicely for Soong).

A single 3770K at 4.6Ghz with two 7970's, that should get a few points a day, I'd say - priced under £2k (including VAT, with the GPUs), that's a much cheaper option than a pre-built Xeon server:

Overclock-bundle:
- Extreme "tested" overclock (4.6GHz)
- Intel Core i7-3770K
- Corsair H100 Hydro "liquid-cooling"
- Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 (2xPCI-e 3.0 slots)
- 2x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 1600MHz DDR3
- "I have a suitable power-supply"
- "I don't require a graphics card"
- "Operating system not required"

Total cost of the above is £801.84 (inc VAT), I get a better deal if I buy two graphics card together and the bundle-package only lets you buy one. So, we now add:

- Corsair Obsidian 550D case @ £119.46 (I have my gaming PC in the 800D, very nice case)
- 2 x Seagate Barracuda ST500DM005 500GB SATA3 7200rpm (RAID-1) @ £42.47 each
- Corsair Digital AX1200i Full Modular 1200W PSU @ £238.94
- Samsung SH-118AB/BEBE DVD-Reader SATA @ £11.39
- 2 x XFX Radeon HD7970 "Black Edition" @ £311.75 each

Total: £1,880.07

Would need to look into whether a debian Linux based system could run the graphics cards properly under BOINC. If not, I'd probably use my Windows 7 Home Premium subscription (from my gaming PC) on the above machine, and upgrade my gaming PC to Pro/Ultimate, which would add to the cost slightly...