"You must start folding again"

Well, I have been eying the 2600k for the last 2 weeks. I have not placed an order yet cause I can not decide on a M.B.

I decided today to fire back up my older pc, its an x3 720 with 4th core unlocked at 4.2.

questions: cause I am reading the latest and greatest and things have changed.

for the amd processor, do I still want -advmethods -smp?
anything else I may be missing that should be flagged?

I'm not sure -advmethods does anything any more, but -smp will work fine on a quad. It should auto detect how many cores you have. If for some reason you want to run on less than the four cores you can start the client with -smp 3 or -smp 2.

On regular smp(not bigadv) advmethods gets some higher producing Wu's on my intel. So use it unless you run bigadv.

242 points for an GRO-A3?
8 hours for each WU
635 PPD

What have I missed, these are providing no where near the points I am reading across the internet.

Use HFM to monitor the Work. You've missed the Quick Return Bonus. Edit: It looks to me as if the 242 point WUs are a4 WUs, most of which are uniprocessor WUs. That would mean you didn't use the -smp flag.