The Scottish Boinc Team

Looking for some thoughts here on what hardware people would buy to make a dedicated cruncher. Now the obvious is mega bucks and lots of them however the challange i set is how cheep could you make your single cruncher so to speek so that you could get another one every 3 months say.

With that in mind i believe having had a quick look at parts it coud be done for £300 although if you have old hard drives and dvd drives kicking around £250 might also be achievable.

The only area that worries me in this type of thing is power. Cheep PSU's are a contradiction. In short they tend to suck so that probably the one area skimping is not allowed. I don't know about you guys but for a cruncher ram is ram, a mobo is a mobo and a case is a case but if your PSU isn't up to 24/7 load then forget it.

So what hardware would you get and why assuming you need to start from scratch?

I'll post mine up later but lets just say a quad core is a must

oh and yeah i might be looking to build a couple of the eventual winners if my payrise comes in....

Well if you are purely after maximum credits and not bothered about what you can crunch with it then I would recommend a 40gb PS3.
£299 3000+ credits a day in PS3 grid.
All you need is a USB memory stick, USB Mouse and USB keyboard, wired LAN connection and one quick download and your away.
Other than that what I used to do was buy one of those cheap AMD barebones systems with a Semeron processor but the mobo's are Athlon X2 ready, another £100 quid gets a decent Athlon to replace the Semperon.

You could get two of these with plenty of cash to spare for a cheap KVM to your existing platform. Load with 64 bit Linux as dual boot and run on something like ABC....should be good for ~2500 per day.

Hi,
Here's my take on a cheap cruncher. I can't guarantee it will do much else tho'. But it does include a Quad as requested

All the parts are from Ebuyer, just because you can get them all there, so I have included their QuickFind code.

Foxconn G31MX-K iG31 Socket 775 £33.08 141238
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping £130.00 131950
Kingston 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz £29.99 129954
Antler 500W PSU 120mm Fan £15.98 138458 
Casecom 6630 Black Midi Tower Case £10.99 119589 
Seagate ST380815AS 80GB Hard Drive £23.39 129414 
Extra Value Black Standard Keyboard £2.99 132133
Extra Value Black Optical Scroll Mouse £2.71 122843

Total £249.13

You may need to add in a couple of case fans, but that should only cose a couple of pounds.


It's not what I would build myself. I would want more, faster memory, a much bigger hard drive, a motherboard with lots of SATA ports and a PCI-E ninja graphics card.

Ian

What about this?

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productprese ... 26SB%3Dplh