Just my 2 cents . . . $2000.00 is far too much. You could only spend that much if WCG was hosting one or more GPU projects, but currently there aren't any. Look at the i7 family, do a lot of price checking and remember - - if you spend twice as much to get the latest board that is only 15% faster at most, you will end up kicking yourself. ("And the angels will weep!" A quote from "My Fair Lady". I like the way it was intoned. I rewatched that DVD many times. )

Lawrence

Added: If you are spending money, do get a UPS power supply. Every time the lights flicker for 2 or 4 seconds, you will get an ineffable sense of superiority in your chest that is worth far more than the cost.

Don't be afraid to look to the used market. If you can find a good used i7 machine you can always modify it to your tastes with spending a ton of money. Good advice from both Lawrence and B21.God luck
Cheers

good suggestion on the cooler. The hyper 212 is a great cooler for the money. I recommend staying from extreme overclocking which negates the need for the big money cooler. but the stock cooler is just not enough for a 100% 24/7 cruncher. I usually disable all the power saving features in the BIOS (they only help if the machine is goind to be idle or lightly loaded some of the time) and crank up the cpu to around 4 GHz with stock voltages. But, getting the cheapest non-overclockable MB is a good way to go also. Two stock speed units beats one extreme overclocked and will probably produce a better points to watt ratio. They will certainly be more stable.

Also, to keep the costs down, consider a free OS like Ubuntu, Mint, etc. I recommend ubuntu's latest LTS (Long Term Stable) release with gaurenteed support for 5 years.

Note on the case. I don't worry about the cooling rating of the case. I just run it without the side(s). the cooler will take care of the CPU. after it's up and running at 100%, I very carefully ground myself to the case and put my finger on the chipset heat sink. If it is uncomfortablly warm, I rig a small cheap fan to blow directlly on it.

I've

had rigs running non-stop through the hottest summer months in this configuration without problems.

Now if you have pets or small children around that could touch the board or the fans, forget this advice and go with a case with a lot of fans and vents as Ryann122 said.


Make sure to install TTrottle and set throttle back around 80c or so.

With a little cleverness and luck on sales, I belive you could put together 3 i7 riggs within your budget. That should give you appx 15,000 boink points per day.

Note on memory: my i7s are running 8 tasks and rarely exceed 4 MB mem use. but I recommend 8 to ensure no disc swapping occurs. fast memory seems to help a little but stay in the value curve and leave the high end to the gamers with money to burn and something to prove.

Note on hard drives: SSDs are very nice in the fact that the OS boots up promptly. But for a 24/7 cruncher I recommend the cheapest reliable spinner HD you can find. Size doesn't matter much; 250 GBs are fine. I've got one i7 running 8 tasks concurrently on a, 12 year old, dead slow SATA 1 recycled 2.5" laptop drive and it puts out a solid 5K BOINC points per day. It does throw out some errors on CEP2 occasionally. but everything else is rock solid.

something like this would be perfect but watch for sales and refurbs and don't pay too much.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136770

Remember, if a dedicated cruncher's HDD fails, you've lost nothing but the work you haven't uploaded and the time to replace. Don't pay extra for server quality and reliability. just be prepared to fix it, reload the OS and BOINC, and keep on crunching