I recently built a new system. Nothing special is what I was telling myself. I will buy it as cheap as I can and then make it do what I want. I neded up purchasing an AMD X2 3600 (65W of course). It is using stock cooling in a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 motherboard (t had good reviews and a good price on newegg ($79)! I also purchased 2 GB or pc 5400 Corsair memory which was also on sale at newegg for ($99). I then proceeded to install it and boot it up at stock clock (in the new Rosewill case) as I loaded the os right? I id get to have some fun once I loaded the Easy Tune software. It let me boost the FSB up to 257 MHz before the CPU couldn't take it anymore. I had boosted the core voltage by two notches and one for the memory at this point. Once I lowered it down to 245 MHz it is rock solid. Actually it was stable at 250 MHz, but I wanted to give it a little cushion.

The nice thing about the utility is that you can boost the FSB of the CPU independent of the rest of the components. I have it running Tanpaku now and it should be in the top 20 computers crunching once I get more than a week's run at it. The benchmarks are pretty good at 2300-2500 seconds for a pep3 work unit and 3600-4300 for a pep4 work unit. I really wonder what I could have gotten out of an opteron processor if this is what you can get from a stock 65W chip with stock cooling. Now is when we need Mitro for some more lessons... My temps are holding steady at 38 degc or 100F. Total cost of the build was 300 since I used an old 13GB hard drive and an older video card and a copy of someone's old w2k software license.

Happy crunching!