I thought about doing the big units when they first came out. I have a dual quad core,
8 physical cores, which at the time was preferred.
It seemed to be over my head and I was running [still am] a linux os.
Possibly...my card is a evga 260/192 with the shaders @ 1512. I run XP home svp3 with all updates on a Tyan Tomcat with a Opteron 180[2.4],2gb ram, no overclock. Also run BOINC 100%.
It's like a rock..no issues ever[touch wood:p]
Plain old "old school" OCCT. NO linpac or whatever.
But, marginal overclocks that yield bad or poor work is not acceptable and defeats the purposes of crunching:D
I have never used linpac/linx or whatever the current utility is. When initial build is done, 1 hour OCCT and I put the box to crunching.
The key as Mike has found out is moderate overclocks. Long term it will beat any cutting edge box.
I ran my farm this way long before it was "cool" to...