@ adamhill1988 Welcome to the UK team and to the forum!

I get just as confused as you on hardware options! The regulars in this thread are pretty friendly (& knowledgeable) and will pitch in with advice on possible configurations.

Pardon my curiosity but is dweymes1994 one of your alter egos?

@ adamhill1988: Welcome to the teams forum

others may say I'm wrong, but I'm also looking for a new system and have been for a while.

1) The cheapest system I've found with an I7 (please don't take this as a recomendation of the company itself, as I have not purchased from them and therefore don't know what their like as a company), is with puterz.co.uk (Zoostorm got quite a bad independent review over build quality, bad case and general noise, so I discount them), but for £500ish, the best you'll get is an I5.

An I7 2600K is a Quad core with Hyperthreading, meaning Boinc can run 8 work units at anyone time, which is why they get more points.

2) Quads "should"?? get you more points over dual cores due to 4 work units being processed at anyone time, rather than 2 work units, that said, everything I have heard about the AMD Bulldozer leads me to believe that the Bulldozer's are only comparative against an I5, it's nowhere near the I7 (even the FX x8), but I've also heard that they run Very Hot, so extra cooling may have to be added.

If you prefer AMD over Intel, I've read several times that the older Phenom II (up to x6 cores), still out performs the FX Bulldozer, but you may end up building the system yourself as I don't know of any company that that sells PC's with the Phenom II?

For your budget, I would say that an I5 would do you proud (hoping that AMD's next CPU release is better, so as to start forcing Intel to reduce their prices, I7's are more expensive now than ever ).

Hope that makes sense (multiple edits due to tiredness).

Perhaps you want to google the seller evisage solutions ltd before purchasing, I did which is why I haven't bought from them, also didn't realise you where after Bundles, thought you were talking complete base unit only PC's.

It out performs due to working on 8 work units at once rather than 4 (assuming 10 points per work unit, 4x10 is 40 (AMD) : 8x10 =80 (Intel I7)).

99.8% positive so i dont see a problem there. Yes im no stranger to building PC's. If I go for the multiple systems It will probably be made in some sort of crazy custom case. Like this http://helmer.sfe.se/. Either way it will no doubt be DIY built rather than store bought.

Ok what about this
£305
2600k 3.4ghz
4gb Ram
4cores 8 threads

£479.76
2500k 3.3ghz
8gb Ram
8core 8threads

£450
phenom x4 3.4 ghz
12gb Ram
12core 12 threads

My instincts tell me the phenom. Even though i'm an intel fanboi