Hello. I've been doing SETI work since early 1999, have been a member of Overclockers.com team for many years, and after taking a few years off (well, more like 5 or so) I've decided to get back on the horse and get crunching again. I just built a new rig, an i7 with 3 cards in it, lead by a GTX980Ti. I think I am going to do what I had started in 2010, getting a little farm together. I have a number of duplicate boards, and memory and procs for them as well, it's just the ancillary stuff like adequate power and ideally getting them set up as diskless stations (thinking Linux) off of a KVM switch, each running a 4 core proc and a decent video card.
I have been running SETI on a couple of computers at my inlaws house for years, because they leave them on all the time, and don't often use them. I noticed while doing an update (I am their IT dept...) that one had stopped processing anything and the other's RAC was dropping precipitously. That's when I found out about v7 fading away, and them having to be upgraded to v8. I did the upgrade on one of them, it's running Win 7 and a decent video card, but the older one is running XP and a not so good video card I have put off as I heard that there are issues with the combination of I believe Nvidias drivers, and older cards while running BOINC v8, with it tossing out apparently good looking but actually bad science.
The one I upgraded gave me the itch for crunching again, so I decided to toss it on my new rig I just build, and one thing seems to be leading to another, and now have I think 5-6 rigs running currently, with looking at what it might take to get the farm up and running. I will need to start collecting decent (700 series minimum, that seems to be where the productivity per watt took a noticeable leap, so that's where I will aim for) video cards, and see how it goes. I won't be running it all out in the summer, mostly just tuning and configuring as the electric bill would kill me, but once the weather cools and winter hits, I can duct outside air into there, and should be looking at very minimal heating bills in the winter! I guess that is one nice thing about living in the great white north.
About v8, well, I've been running it on a number combinations of OS/GPUs, from X3360 LGA775 boards with a 560 in it, up to my new i7, and it appears that they are all running properly. A couple are used for more than just crunching, and I haven't really noticed any issues with it, at least yet. Not sure what the issues others were having, but at least for me, it all appears to be working, and I am using optimized apps as well. Maybe time to take another look at it? Oh, and Hi again, everyone!
