I read the article and and the 6 pages of comments after it. To me, it looks like the i5 is going to give the best value. It won't necessarily do the most most work, but will give the best bang for the buck. There is also very little said about running these chips at 100% for weeks on end and how turbo boost handles cpu bound tasks. I will keep an eye on it and hope others do also. Might actually prompt me to build one, but mostly I am to cheap to spring for cutting edge technology.

Cheers

I've had my new machine for a couple of days now, and I'm quite pleased -- still trying out different things with it so I'm not quite sure of some of its capabilities yet. What I wanted was a minimum of a quad-core CPU and a double-precision GPU, that would run cool and not draw too much power. And I certainly seem to have gotten that.

The basic specs are:
AMD Phenom II X4 910e ( 2.6 GHz, 65 W)
Nvidia GeForce GT430 (lowest end of the Fermi line, 49 W)
8 Gb DDR3
the OCZ Onyx 32 GB SSD that Bearcat pointed us to

When all 4 CPU cores are crunching at 100% and the GPU is idling, this draws 100-102 watts and the CPU temp is at about 38 C with just the stock fan.

When the GPU also is crunching full tilt, power consumption goes up to about 120 watts, and the GPU temp is about 40 C, also with the stock fan.

Crunching speed per core as I expected is indistinguishable from my 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, but of course the AMD runs 4 at a time rather than 2.

The GPU is slow -- I knew it would be slow but I had hoped not quite THIS slow. I just started it on a GPUgrid job and it looks as if it's going to take around 27 hrs. I need a double precision card for some work stuff I'm doing, and this one will serve -- without eating too much electricity.

I put Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on it. I found an even easier way to install the newest Nvidia drivers by adding the ubuntu-x-swat repository:
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Open terminal and copy the following commands:


Now go to Menu System-->Administration-->Additional Drivers and activate the current Nvidia driver.
Reboot your computer.
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Presumably if this hadn't been a new install, I would have had to deactivate and uninstall the old drivers before installing the new ones.

I like the SSD. (Thanks for the tip, Bearcat!) Even with 3 CEP2 WUs running at the same time, I'm getting only about 11 mins difference between wall clock time and CPU time (as opposed to 30-40 mins on my Core 2 Duo with a regular hard drive).

Kate (smiling cruncher )

Glad to have helped. Haven't got off my butt to move the OS over to the ssd. Am glad it's working for you. I am using it as a scratch disk for now. Had to enable AHCI for ubuntu 10.10 to recognize it. Did you have to? Might just do a total reinstall when I do it. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks Kate.

Brink, did you try disabling 1 thread? I upped mine to 15 and still going good. Think it was a bad batch of WU's. Turned it back down as the difference in crunching time when almost maxes out was minimal. Will wait until prices start to drop and get a double precision card for my main rig and put this one in my ubuntu cruncher. Still haven't decided on which one yet but leaning toward the 470.

Let it run like that for a few days to insure it's stable. Then bump it up one to see if it will not crash. So far, mine is working w/15 threads again. Just maxes my settings on the GPU to see what happens. Hope it doesn't crash and I see more than 2 minutes gain in crunching time. I jumped on a team recently as I didn't know about this team. Will have to switch. Thanks for the info.

Just switched. Not the fastest card but will add points. After cranking GPU to max, only gained 3 minutes crunching time so backed it off a bit. Hopefully the card prices will drop soon so I can get a better card for this.