Sounds like you are catching the bug for crunching Brandon.

I started with a q6600 and then added machines as I could but this year I had a revamp and changed from small fast rigs to fewer multicore beasts that run slower and in the process cut my power bill down by a big chunk.

I hankered after running 1 big rig for a while before getting it done and now I run 5 8c/16t cpus that crunch exclusively.

The extra rigs were not really planned but when one gets the chance of £1100 worth of barebones rig for £300.... well plans change.

I was browsing ebay and noticed that some of last years E5-26xx and E5-46xx engineering samples were getting out into the wild.

Whilst this is strictly illegal, it seems that Intel are less concerned due to them being last years model.

To put things in perspective I bought 2.4Gig inc ht cpu's at ~£200

I had no idea how it would actually perform here but the premise was that it should equate approximately to a 2600K clocked to 4.8. ......and I was not far off when looking at points scores of my old 2600K @ 4.7Gig.

The power used by that overclocked rig exceeded 200W, now two of these in one rig are using 250W total (those figures include an idle 7950 gpu)

I was running at about 150 cores, split between 20 @home and the rest at my workplace on a virtual farm. I`m no longer employed there, so most of them will be winding down. I had a good run there though. I estimate something like 250 years came out of that farm over a few years. Not to bad.

yeah was a good time :) used only on servers 280 threads, 140 cores, with the daily crunching time nearly 5 months.....

Thank you for posing this very important question that certainly affects all of us. Currently I am crunching on all my cores. None of the cores that are not available to WCG are currently crunching. Thic should not change should the number of computers that I have attached to WCG, change.