I have to admit that if I didn't own a tech business, I would never even THINK about an SR-2 mobo.
The cheapest dual Xeon mobo's with PCIe graphics slots are about $260 and fit into a normal ATX case. Cheapest "starter" 4-core CPU's are about $230 each (E5506?) but they are non-hyperthread. Cheapest hyperthreaded 4-cores are $390 (E5620). However, dual-xeon systems are server motherboards, so overclocking is usually impossible unless you are SR-2.
You only need about 6GB of ram to run F@H on a dual CPU system. But you DO need a special powersupply. It must have leads for 2 CPU power, so it's normally going to be a 750w+ modular. The $99 Rosewill 1000w seems to work fine.
So the cheapest bigadv dual Xeon system would be roughly $1400, or $1200 to upgrade an existing system.
That's a big donation when you consider that unless you are video editing or doing digital animation, or compiling huge applications, you really don't need that much computer.
Now the cheapest Bigadv are actually single i7 setups:
Run a i7-950 at 4ghz for about $750.
And there are AMD Opteron options out there that are cheaper than Intel to boot. The big daddy is running 4x 12-core Opterons. Xeons only run a max of 2 CPU's.
But why BigAdv? These machines can be made quiet, use little power, and the BigAdv client "detunes" excellent so you don't know F@H is even running. Plus you only manage 1 F@H instance instead of several.
I can't use the Graphic clients at work because they are loud, hot, and interfere with the machine operation in most cases. Also, I'm going to cut back the number of clients I run. I can't babysit 10 computers, nor am I willing to donate 3000w of electricity at commercial (higher) power rates. By using 1 bigadv machine at work to make my donation, I actually won't be using more power than before I started folding.
