I agree completely with your assessment. If the "thrill of the build" is not part of the equation, there is no point. Interesting proposal on a non profit also. what about buying in bulk with no OS to save $ and as a value added the non-profit would unbox, install a modern linux distro like ubuntu or mint, add boinc and burn in. for a few days. Now you got me going:..... maybe form a team ran by the non-profit that would administer the crunching farm and ..... OK I'll stop.

I've found a good way to have public and private conversations is via slack.

The gridcoiners use this on a lot https://teamgridcoin.slack.com/messages/C19T3E40K/files/F7P2L3V7Z/

Hi and sorry for the late reply. I looked at the Banana Pi M3 and from what I can tell, it's $83 and it seems I can use the 8GB storage to install Linux. It's super small, but I also am not a linux guru nor do I know how many WUs the Banana Pi M3 would crunch in a day (I do the Cancer projects).

As someone touched on before, it would be great to get some "WCG bundles" somewhere including step by step instructions on how to install WCG for these non-prebuilt systems. I'm very technical, but not strong in Linux. I wouldn't even know if WCG is running its best on the Banana Pi M3.

If you or someone could answer my question about how many WUs the Banana Pi M3 would crunch daily and maybe provide a link to a website/pdf that shows how to get it up and running with WCG, that would be fantastic.

Hi. Can you share some details on the $600 system you built such as the eBay auctions you purchased?

My goal is to simply crunch as much as possible for a great price. I'm not overly worried about power consumption because the Tiny uses 65watts while it has one of the latest 8-core i7 chips. I would purchase at most 10 of these 65watt systems because I don't feel like my electric bill going through the roof.

Let's say I wanted to build a comparable system to the Tiny i7 that is roughly $525 (with my discount)...I don't want to do all the research, shopping, setup, etc. to save $50. It's just not worth my time anymore as a working dad of 3. If I could save $200 per comparable machine, sure.

I also don't want to purchase 100 low-crunching systems just because they use 9 watts of power...because that's 100 machines I would have to network, physically provide power, and of course manage if/when they hiccup.

As a comparison to your $600 Xeon 32 core machine...my Lenovo Tower (same chip as Tiny but a tower case) is generating 45,000+ points per day. Therefore, the Tiny i7 for $525 using 65watts of power is generating 2x the points as your $600 32-core. I'm not rubbing it in...just comparing in case I am missing something. I believe without my discount the Tiny is $630.

After all this typing, maybe my answer is simple: The Lenovo Tiny m710 with my discount is just the best out there for crunching and watts combined. Or am I wrong?

I bought a Motherboard/CPU/Memory combo from Natex.us
http://natex.us/intel-s2600cp2j-motherboard-dual-e5-2670-sr0kx/

The price including memory has gone up considerably since then due to DRAM price increases. The 128gb bundle now seems to be over $800. I think it was closer to $500 when I got my bundle. Probably $50 less for a 64GB version.

I added some Hyper Evo 212 CPU coolers ($25) each and some 128GB SSD ($37).

BOINC points, not WCG points. 7x multiplier there to add on top of the 20k, I forget the actual number. My own i7 gets nowhere close to the 2P. I was getting 55-70k BOINC points with the 2p, 3570k (3 threads), 3770k and 1950x running ZIKA when I was last running it. MIP seems to be a lot lower atm.
http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=user&proj=bwcg&name=1013137

65W from the wall? Or is that the spec of the i7? I got the number from my UPS.

65w is what the Lenovo PDF states that this machine uses.