That's great publicity for WCG but those characterizations are . . . hyperbolic IMHO. There are a lot of people here running 2p and probably even a few 4P servers that do a great deal more work.

But even if you just want to look at speed, there are the EVGA SR2 and SRX boards where people do some impressive stuff oc'ing Xeons and adding 2,3 and even 4-way xfire or SLI.

But I have to say it's quite nice to see WCG get some good press in place like gizmodo especially when it gets mentioned in the same breath as SETI - which a lot more people have heard of. So kudos to Mr. Schropp for getting WCG noticed.

In this article it is mentioned that the machine does 8000 WU per day. A machine with two GPU boards. To me this claim sounds unrealistic. I have a similarly oc'ed machine with one Radeon 7970 HD and the maximum is 2300 WU. If you add a second 7970 you do not double the number as you have to split the same CPU on the two GPUs. And even if you double you are at 4600 which is very far from the 8000 claimed.

I just downloaded DAWS again. Seems I lost the first copy in the digital forest somewhere along with my data. Anyway, I had enough to do a comparison. I have 3 machines with dual 7950's. Two are 2600k's, so slower machines but the cards are oc'ed by about 10% I think. Based on a 5 day sample, they do about 800-900 wu's per day.

The dual Xeon that runs 32 threads and has 2 7950's does closer to 1000 wu's per day. (edit - sorry, about 1100-1200)

And I've looked at the gpu usage from the catalyst control panel and they're all maxed out pretty much 90% of the time at least I would say. So 8k does seem a little off.

It varies depending on whether it's a single or double wu. But that's where some of the confusion is. He's apparently getting only double wu's (not sure how) so he's taking his total and doubling it to get the number of singles.

I don't know what to say other than to point you to the specs for the best rig I have to compare which is the 2P E5-2687W I was talking about before - the one with 32 threads. His machine is I guess 40% or so faster on flops than mine. From the blog, it looks like his cards are about 30+% faster than my lightly oc'ed 7950's. Haven't looked to see how many more shaders he's got.

So that's a significant difference but I'm not sure how that translates into 4x more wu's - that's if I assume all of mine are also doubles. I'm not saying it doesn't work out that way, I'm just very puzzled as to how.

With my one (oc'ed but still low-end) HD7750 with 3 - 8 cores of i7-3770 I am doing ca. 500 WU's per day. And 7970's are waaaay powerful, aren't they?

Cheers