I may be interested in buying a computer/server in order to contribute to some projects using BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/). I'm looking for a bare-bones system as that is all it will likely do. Building my own from components is likely the most economical way to do this.

So I'm left with the question of which hardware to choose, and which will maximize my computing power per dollar. Is there a good measure of this? Some benchmarks? I'll probably be looking at an AMD64 architecture, but which to choose? Are the new Core 2s that much better than an Athlon 64? Is it worth looking at Opteron/Xeon?

The Playstation 3 is probably the most ridiculously powerful of all possible BOINC clients but not many projects support that architecture.

basically this is the sort of thing i would build form special offers on websites, after all all you need is a decent processor, a lump of cleap ram a cheap hdd and mbo, nothing else,

i would agree with debian as a distro as it has boinc in repos ,
and can be installed CLI only if you dont mind not having boincmgr

a core 2 quad or xeon quad would be best if you really want to rank up those seti/einstein/cpdn credits fast....
npo point with SIMAP as they dont seem to have any work to do....

http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...0271&trans=off