It all depends on your budget (both up-front for the hardware and in the long term for electricity and maintenance).

My fastest PC is one that I custom built:
AMD 2990WX (bought on Ebay). It spits out an impressive amount of completed WUs every day, but of course it gets hot. And I use SilverArrow TR4 with 3 fans as cooling and can reach 3.55GHz all-core @ 78-82 degrees Celcius. Water cooling would probably help, but I prefer the reliability of air cooling for 24/7.

64GB RAM (Yes, I am using this PC for other things too outside of WCG), but I have a RAM-disk on 12GB for WCG (it will really save you SSD from a lot of writes that will otherwise wear it out quickly with so many simultaneous tasks) and a few GBs for TEMP-folder for Browser.

GPU is a GTX 1080, but when OPN1 releases GPU tasks I will look closer into an upgrade.

My most efficient system though is probably an AMD 2700X @ 4.1GHz all -core paired with 16GB of RAM and an MSI B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard. It has a 32MB BIOS chip, so I hope it will get support for 5000-series CPUs from AMD too.

I also have some older PCs that could use an upgrade sometime, we'll see.

I've heard that buying engineering samples "ES" xeon chips on ebay could be good value also.

It would be nice to find reasonably priced dual-CPU workstations.

1)It would save physical space

2)It would save a network connection/IP address and/or wifi saturation

3)It would likely use less power than 2 equally-powerful machines.

4)It would be only 1 machine that I need to manage as far as reboots, power outtages, OS patches, etc.


If anyone knows of any dual CPU systems that would give 16+ threads, please let me know the make/model and if you have a weblink to see a price, that would be great. I don't need anything more than 32GB of RAM unless there is some kind of cpu/memory connection (I thought I read this year some manufacturers force you to buy more RAM before you can get a 2nd CPU but maybe I'm incorrect). I'm also not sure if I am able to buy regular i7 or i9 chips or if I have to purchase Xeon to get more than 1 physical cpu. My brief searching this year was yielding dual-Intel Xeon machines that cost $2500+ while I can buy a single-Intel high end i7 or even i9 for $800 tops. So 2 of those would cost me $1600 tops...I'm not paying $900+ for convenience.

1) I use a KVM switch so only 1 monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I have 3 PC's on a UPS and 1 laptop.

2) I'm presuming you are not talking about static WAN IPs but LAN IPs. There are 254 in a standard LAN. 256 to the 3rd power (minus 2) if using 10.0.0.0/8. Traffic is negligible. I presume you do not have rooms full of machines. An obsolete switch or hub could link them all up to the main router with 1 wire using a Powerline kit and regular power outlets.

4) There is only 1 which needs a reboot and that's the Win10 laptop. The rest are Xubunto LTS 20.04 and updates are turned off. Unless Boinc is a security risk, and Berkley says there is next to none, then why update anything until something breaks.

Yes a dual-CPU workstation would be nice.

Fixed an error in the power of above

Interesting link above for your stats. I can only relate to the non-Xeon ones like your i7-3770 which I am waiting for to replace a limping PC.

Am curious as to why those single CPU machine are running Windows 7 and Vista. I can see keeping the Win10 licenses alive on the E8400. If there is a reason you can still upgrade 7 and Vista to 10 if you want. I have a link which still worked in September 2020.

That's neat you can view the hosts. For some reason when I try to pull up my hosts, it says hidden. Any ideas why? Don't think I ever did anything to disable access to hosts. Maybe there's a setting buried somewhere.

https://www.boincstats.com/stats/15/user/detail/256193