The PPH is impressive! and at only $5 pm it sounds like value for mony...

How does that compare to a multi-thread device, virtual or physical?

This is a little off topic but I'm curious about something. How long do you guys plan on running these machines? The reason I ask is because for example on the 5650's, you can buy those on ebay for about $150 for the pair. I'm guessing that you can get a compatible dual socket mobo and memory for a few hundred bucks more. And truthfully, anyone who has been doing this for any length of time probably has a few boxes of spare parts like memory sticks, PSUs and cases lying about anyway.

What I'm trying to say is, if you're going to be running these machines for any length of time, isn't it a lot cheaper to just build something yourself? It seems to me that it would easily pay for itself within 12-18 months tops. What am I missing here?

Seriously? How much do you pay per kwh for electricity? It would have to be over 40 cents USD at least or I guess a bit less in NZD. As I said above I pay around 20 cents and the 5650's draw around 150watts I think so I'm rounding up to about $25/month. At 40 cents you'd be paying $50, so I can see how you wouldn't mind spending the extra 20 bucks for the convenience.

I don't really understand the internet cost unless you're on dialup service, but if you needed an extra line, I guess that would make sense.

But all in all, I would think that you're in a fairly unique situation, no? And are rates really that bad in NZ? That's awful.

Thanks. I understood that, but I was looking Thargor's post where he was paying about $70/month for a dual 5650. I just happen to have two of those, both of which are currently idle. Actually one is a 5660. So I have a rough idea of what it costs to run those. Also I have a pretty high utility rate. Not the highest in the world, but it's definitely up there. And even for me, it only costs at most $25/mo to run those rigs.

So I picked the highest performing example I saw in the thread and figured I would look to see what used hardware costs, factor in the cost of electricity and see if you were better off just buying the parts and building a rig rather than renting cloud servers. And as far as I can tell, unless you're paying truly onerous utility rates, I don't really understand the logic of doing this.

Mind you I'm not trying to stop anyone or talk anyone out of this. I'm just trying to understand why anyone would want to. I understand that building a server rig can be a little daunting, but hey, we're supposed to be a community here, if WCG can't help, we can refer to a couple a very good and helpful sites like TechPowerUP or XtremeSystems that would be happy to help you.

But aside from that, I just don't get it. It's wonderful to see this sort of enthusiasm, but I'd rather see people contribute and keep as much money in their pockets as possible in the process - not support for-profit cloud services. I don't really see any point to that.

OK. That makes sense. But just fyi, if you do a little research, you can find case fans that are essentially silent in normal operation. I don't remember the exact db numbers but their more quiet than a whisper. The same goes for CPU coolers - although for certain types of motherboards, your choice of coolers can be limited.

But still, that makes perfect sense regardless. There's also the space issue especially if you have children or pets and would want the machine someplace isolated. That's not always possible.

It's a shame that we can't create some sort of crunching cooperative where people could sign certain of their machines up to name that would represent a pool of users and then those users would share the points generated in some predetermined way. Then people who have the funds could support people who have the space and cheap electricity and everyone could benefit.