I stay until Sapphire. Never jump away in the middle of a job.
Sapphire should be in about 6 days. Maybe faster. Over the week end I will change some CPU coolers and push again the clocks. The idea is to have no CPU under 3.6 Ghz at the end of the day. At the moment I am Between 3.4 and 3.7 whith room to go. On every device I move the clock 100 Mhz and then let it run a few days, check the stabilized core temps, and then push again. The core temp limit I have set is 75-78C. Tj limit is at 100C for the core i7 so staying under 80C is ok.
A 100 MHz gain on one CPU results to 1Ghz gain on my Solar System.
I have also pushed the DDR3 to their rated limits. That is 1600 Mhz for some devices or 2000Mhz for others all in 8-8-8.

I am using the Asus Triton88 and it is really an excellent heatsink. I am now in the process of changing all my devices and installing this new heatsink. 7 out of 10 machines are now equipped. Yesterday I changed two machines that had the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev2 (FXR2) , and I immediately got the core temps going down by 18C in average and up to 23C in some cases 58C instead of 81. That is an impressive gain which allows for a good frequency gain of at least another 250 MHz per cpu. Over 10 machines this means the equivalent of a new i7 920.

There is also a change with the thermal paste. On the FXR2 heatsink there is a thermal paste pad already pre installed on the heatsink surface. But the quality of this paste is really not good, it is too elastic and too thick. With the Triton88 I use a separate thermal paste where I can better control quality and quantity and thus the excellent improvement.

There is also another factor that may play and is the difference between the fixing systems. The Triton 88 has a very sturdy and strong high quality fixing system with four large bolts screwed through the motherboard and to a backplate, that spreads well the pressure of the heatsink over the surface of the CPU. The FXR2 has a more frail plastic structure that deforms and the whole heatsink has only two small screws to fix onto the CPU. The result is an unevenly and low pressure and probably in the end not a very good contact bewteen heatsink and CPU. I had also one case where the plastic fixing structure came partly out with the weight of the heatsink, after a few days of use and had all my cores shooting up to 90C.
With the Triton88 I have also a coherent set of core temps across all my CPU's. I means that all get the same temps at the same frequencies give or take 2C. With the FXR2 I had big differences due to the low quality of paste and uneven prefssuse due to the bad fixing system.

The Triton 88 is 20 US$ more expensive than the FXR2 one but once you have invested hundreds of dollars on a 950 then the best heatsink you can get is really worth the few dollars more.

To conclude, wheen choosing a heatsink these are the following points to check:

1) Number of heat pipes (the more the better). There are 6 per side copper on the Triton 88 and 4 per side on the FXR2, at least a 120mm fan included. Check for copper heatpipes (better heat conduction) instead of aluminium. On the Triton 88 you have one 120mm fan inside the heatsink, but you can add two 120mm fans optional on each side if you wish for a total of three 120mm fans. I did not do that but I could probably reach 4Ghz with such a mount. I will still not do it because the power consumption at 4 Ghz is prohibitive in terms of cost when you crunch 24/7.

2) Check for mounting system. These heatsinks are heavy and big. When the motherboard stands vertical like in a desktop, then the heatsink is in a cantilever position and pulls with all his weight.

3) Check the surface of the heatsink contact to the CPU. Flatness, perfect polish, thickness.

4) Thermal paste.

5) Noise, but these are not important for machines that are in my basement in a separate room. By the way the FXR2 is more quiet then the Triton88.

Thanks Hypernova. The Triton 88 sounds like a very good heatsink.
I recently installed a bespoke heatsink, modified from a skt 939 via a socket fitting. Although it has 4 pipes, and still leaves something to be desired (lacks a bit), it did reduce my temps by about 10degrees C. I dont fancy spending £45 on a heatsink just now, but who knows what the future holds.
O/T I have just popped up the clocks on 3 of my GPUs. Two by about 12% on my i7-920 and one by 15% on a Q6600, same voltage=same cost

You could start running HPFP2 and HCC now, along side FA@H:
Although you might not get your next saphire just as early, you should actually end up getting all 3 sapphires slightly earlier! I would certainly suggest you run both the HPFP2 and HCC tasks together.
Towards the end of FA@H have a look at your pending validations and in progress tasks, to see when it would be better to start running the other tasks - or you might overshoot the mark and take longer to get the other Sapphires.
I still think they might release another badge for 4 or 5 years, so I will aim to reach 5years for NRW before the project ends, even if it is in vain.

It's not a question of 'think'... it was posted somewhere that a few more will be rolled out, and no they're not anything with little marbles, stars or roman numerals added to them... plain badges. Could be gems or very pricey metals... I'd be walking with my dentals dentures in a jar if I said anything specific. And I'd say, the latter will be minimal 4x sapphire, that bit was not shared at all nor the timing and will see it when I see it... since 98% of my crunching time goes to WCG.

In case the knowledge goes lost, or troubles persist with the search tool:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/...ead,28106_offset,0#260091

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/...ead,25084_offset,0#223933

edit: dentures