Hello,
If you had a budget of $750.00 to build a dedicated seti @ home computer how would you build it and what would you put into it? What would be the most effective setups in terms of raw credits/day and what would be best in terms of credits/watt because electricity is expensive where I am.

As many video cards as you can fit and power supply to power them.

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Does seti@home still use video cards, I heard that their are no boinc projects that use video cards but that may be world community grid. In which case do video cards get significantly more credits/day than video cards.


Also which is better, a single higher end video card (like a r9 270x) or multiple low end video cards (like 3-4 r9 7750)

Does seti@home still use video cards, I heard that their are no boinc projects that use video cards but that may be world community grid.

<<shudder>> Someone's giving you some bad info.

Here are some BOINC projects. The ones with GPU support have NVidia and/or AMD logos.

If you're concerned about power usage fewer newer cards are going to be more power efficient than more from days of yore.

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Does seti@home still use video cards, I heard that their are no boinc projects that use video cards but that may be world community grid. In which case do video cards get significantly more credits/day than video cards.


Also which is better, a single higher end video card (like a r9 270x) or multiple low end video cards (like 3-4 r9 7750)

1) Video cards far outperform cpu. The more video cards you have, the more productive you are.

2) The more high end video cards you have, the more productive you are. In your case you have a budget of 750. So your job becomes the balancing act of performance vs cost. A fancy case with worthless to you. A bunch of LED and neon lights is worthless to you. They just waste your money. You want decent mobo, decent cpu, some cheap ass ram that will last. Expansive high end psu, and the best video cards you can afford.

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How is this:

COUGAR Spike Black Steel / Plastic MicroATX Mini Tower Gaming Case with USB 3.0 and 12CM Cougar Fan

EVGA 500 B 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified 500W Active PFC ATX12V v2.31/EPS 12V v2.91 3 Year Warranty 100-B1-0500-KR Power Supply

Intel Pentium G3220 Haswell 3.0GHz LGA 1150 54W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics

MSI H81M-P33 LGA 1150 Intel H81 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner

Logitech MK120 Black USB Wired Slim Desktop

Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver Thermal Compound

ADATA XPG V1.0 series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit - OEM

SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 ST750LM022 750GB 5400 RPM

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - CPU Cooler with 120 mm PWM Fan

HIS IceQ X² Turbo Boost Clock H270XQMT2G2 Radeon R9 270X 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support



All this for $760, but it will be $35 cheaper because of mail in rebates. I know the windows 7 isn't required but I work well with it. However the 7750s that are being offered for $60 are tempting right now.


Any idea on the credits/day this would get.

you'll want a much bigger Case. A mini atx case won't have enough airflow for the CPU or room for the GPU. Consider getting at least a quad core CPU. skip the apu style onboard graphics type CPU/gpu as it is a waste of time and mixes GPU types.

For cost effectiveness look at a quad or 6 core AMD. YOu'll want to have 2 cores free to feed the GPU 3 WU's at a time. Thus my choice of avoiding the dual core CPU altogether. AMD CPU's and mobo's tend to be a bit cheaper than intel.

That AMD GPU is pretty nice. However, AMD GPU's tend to be a bit slower at processing the S@H multibeam WU's but really cook on the AP's. If you plan on running other projects outside of seti then the AMD will do very well.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Ok thanks, will try to get another list together.