What Should I Buy??

Hello! Building a new computer for work. Got $400-500 to spend on CPU, GPU, Memory and PS. What should i get? Talk to me!

Who owns the machine?

If you do, then seti sounds fun.
If it is employer property get permission before proceeding. It's not worth loosing a job.

eaglescouter said:

Who owns the machine?

If you do, then seti sounds fun.
If it is employer property get permission before proceeding. It's not worth loosing a job.

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My friend owns the company who run seti.... Already have it on my current machine which I will rebuild and use as a testing machine.

Just CPU/GPU/RAM/PS needed? What motherboard are you running. It'll obviously make a difference to what CPU is recommended.

Duner said:

Just CPU/GPU/RAM/PS needed? What motherboard are you running. It'll obviously make a difference to what CPU is recommended.

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Guess I should have been more clear. I am flexible on that. I am not going to be overclocking at all. What a decent chip and GPU set to give me the max RAC output at stock settings.

Cuper said:

Guess I should have been more clear. I am flexible on that. I am not going to be overclocking at all. What a decent chip and GPU set to give me the max RAC output at stock settings.

Click to expand...

"Decent" cpu can vary a lot. There are a list of "Top Hosts" at the SETI home page, (upper right hand corner has the link to it), so that would be a great place to scan through the list, see their RAC, and see what you consider to be "decent".

It doesn't say whether the systems listed are overclocked or not, but I would expect all the top listings, to be overclocked - so your results would be less, but it does show what works best.

The i7's (3970 and such), are a great cpu right now, and the Nvidia high end cards are rocking as well. The "ti" versions of every Nvidia card, is generally a step up in performance, versus the base model with the same model number.

Good luck, and happy building!

I would suggest getting the absolute cheapest CPU/RAM combo that you think will suffice for the office based work. I would go dual core with HT (4 threads) or quad core. Doesn't really matter if it's AMD/Intel, but AMD will obviously be cheaper. Then get a good 500-600W power supply, don't cheap out here. That will be enough to power a good NVIDIA video card. Run 2-3 instances of SETI on the card and NONE on the CPU. That will provide the most RAC IMO.

I'm not sure where the cheapest prices are where you live, but I just quickly put together something from newegg to give you an idea.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1306601

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104339&IsVirtualParent=1

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121656R

$135 CPU/Mobo
$50 RAM
$90 PSU
$245 GPU

I believe the GPU still works best when there's a free CPU core to feed it. The quad core CPU can feed the GPU running 3 instances of SETI on the one card.