New rig and the upcoming Pentathlon

[SuicideCabbage]

Well with the 2012 Bonic Pentathlon starting in about a month, it's time for that upgrade I have been waiting for. I was going to get a FX-8150 and try to clock it at 4.2Ghz. From my research I don't think AMD has any more 8-cores on the horizon, if I missed something please let me know. I also need some advice on GPUs, my primary goal is to run Milkyway@home, from what I have seen a 6930 or 6950 will give me bigger bang for my buck when compared to the 7850. I did read on one forum that the 7000 series runs better with the bulldozer than the 6000, not sure if this is true so I wanted your take on that as well. Let me know what you guys think, I am going to use this as my primary rig, but the vast majority of it's time will be spent as a BOINC rig so I want to build it as such.

[Brucifer]

Look at what your real interest is in (project-wise) and pick the GPU for that, as that project is what you are going to be concentrating on over the long haul... In your case it appears to be milky way. Myself, I only mess with the GPU projects, both boinc and non-boinc. I don't run the cpu's on stuff anymore as heat becomes too much of a factor. Some projects of course don't utilize gpu's and then the name of the game is maxo cores... the smp efforts on f@h are a good example of many cores generating a lot of credit -- if you are in it for the credit competition for teams. What I have been debating about is putting together a multi-GPU system and the cpu cores just utilized for feeding the gpu's. Again though, power consumption (heat) really gets into the game. I guess the question to ask yourself since you mention bulldozer is what you intend to use it for. You can build killer boxes with multiple gpu's and such, but sometimes you are better off to build two systems, one for your gpu projects running off a low cost dual core that doesn't take high end memory, etc., so you put the money into the gpu's, and then just another system that is maxed out for the multi-core cpu(s). Myself anymore, I'm looking more towards a low end dual core cpu on a multi-gpu (4 slots) motherboard with only 2 gpu's installed and extra cooling fans as keeping things cool helps them live longer under 24x7 use. I guess it's also because I don't like having all my eggs in one huge system. :-) lol

[Dirk Broer]

It depends on how you look at it, purchase price versus running price

HD 6950 runs at 200 Watt, giving 563.3 GFLOP Double Precision (needed for MilkyWay) = 2.82 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp
HD 6970 runs at 250 Watt, giving 675.8 GFLOP DP = 2.70 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp
HD 7850 runs at 130 Watt, giving 440.3 GFLOP DP = 3.39 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp

THE king of DP is the HD 6990 at the moment, doing 1274.8 at 375 Watt = 3.40 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp
THE king of GFLOP DP per watt is the HD 7970, doing 947.2 at 230 Watt = 4.12 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp

Only other card to reach the 4.00 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp is the HD 7770, doing 320.0 GFLOP DP at a mere 80 Watt tdp
Honorable mentioning for the HD 7750, doing 204.8 GFLOP DP at only 55 Watt tdp = 3.72 GFLOP DP/Watt tdp