If you only have 1 stick of ram it would be best to stick another 8 in the machine, but if you have 2 sticks of 4 each, then Boinc is just fine. If you can get a 6 core cpu it would be better, but by how much is debatable. Yes you WILL crunch more units with it, you can do 6 at a time, but the cost to do those extra 2 units may not be worth it. You will be spending x amount of money to do only 2 more units unless you can get faster cpu and a bigger L2 cache too. Boinc likes an L2 cache of at least as big as the unit is so it can load the whole unit into memory and not have to swap parts in and out as it needs tthem. Celeron and Duron based machines do not do as well as non Celeron or Duron machines for this reason. One thing to consider is to spend your money instead on a good gpu, ie video card, as they can crunch units MUCH faster than any cpu can. WCG does NOT currently support gpu crunching though, so if you only crunch for WCG then you can hold off on that. BOTH AMD and Nvidia make good gaming level gpu's that are suitable for crunching but there is ALOT to learn before buying your first one!!

BTW, kateiacy how did you get the cool signature with your statistics?

8 gigs of Corsair RAM is fine. However for 50 bucks more to double the amount of RAM (provided the model of RAM is compatible with the Motherboard in the configuration which I take is dual channel?) may be good unless you just need that money for something else. Also are you going to be using the same speed of RAM or are going to upgrade it? Sometimes what is more important is the model of RAM and it's speed rather then how much of it there is. But Corsair does make good gaming ram so odds are you don't see that much used of it being used due to how good the RAM is at doing it's job.


My ram is triple channel. Six slots but I have 3 sticks of 2 gig Kingston Hyperx Ram in it currently. Can ramp up to 24 gigs. May do that in two years if I can get a good price on the 6 sticks of 4 gig RAM that can be used in the motherboard.

Yeah...avoid the ram upgrade until you actually have a need for it. Right now, most of the WCG projects are well under what you have in that system as is. However, you would probably see a bigger speed boost by going to solid state hard drives if you haven't already. Being a dedicated cruncher, you could probably get by with one of the cheaper smaller ones. Depending on the projects (CEP2 for example) you may find it to be the single best upgrade over all.