My dad wants a crazy system. Help me help him.

[gsrcrxsi]

Ok so my dad is looking to build a crazy new system. He's always built high end stuff for no apparent reason other than to watch it crunch SETI all day lol, but hey, he's retired now and has nothing better to do.

Will be used for:
SETI he's a numbers *****
(And I might try to mooch some CPU time for bitmining)

His initial idea to me was this:

Dual socket 2011 10-core chips (40 threads)
Over clocked
Water cooled

Sounded cool. But I did some research and it doesn't look like the 10-core chips overclock well or at all. All the Xeons are multiplier locked right? So without the OC, the water cooling seems unnecessary.

It also seems that not many dual 2011 boards even support much overclocking. Right? Or is there a board that will do it?

If 10-core is a no-go, what about 8-core? Or will we have to drop down to 6-cores to get any real overclock?

Any other ideas on building a monster rig?
Thoughts on what will be faster, 2 over clocked 6-cores? Or 2 stock speed 10-cores?

He's a hard intel fanboi.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

All Xeon chips will be multi-locked.

Why not go 12-core? Like the E5-2697 v2?

Most dual socket boards won't support overclocking, as they are meant for small servers or CAD workstations.

To really OC, he will need to get an i7 with an unlocked multiplier.

Considering that all the Xeon chips (with one or two exceptions) have Hyperthreading, 2x 10 core with HT will be faster than 2x 6 core OC with HT for something like SETI.

 

[gsrcrxsi]

Would I be correct in assuming that watercooling would be a waste on the stock clock chips? I mean his dual quad core rig now is hella loud, as they love in the cool basement where no one has to listen to them lol.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Something like 2x Hyper 212 EVO coolers would be overkill since you can't really OC them.
Any decent air cooler will be pretty quiet on there.