Thanks Rickjb for your comment. You are absolutely right. In fact I have recycled graphic cards I had anyway. For the new cards I use the Nvidia GT220 as standard. In fact it is a little under 100$, but it runs cuda (not very powerful but ready when WCG may have it) and is powerful enough for aero of Windows, I know it is not important for crunching but this a personal issue. Regarding hard disks it is the same situation. I recycled hard disks I had already but for a new one I set the standard as a Velociraptor 300 GB. The reason is that it is one of the fastest and price has well gone down with the SSD's coming but still much too expensive and I still am not convinced about their long term reliability.
My point here is that I wanted every machine to be fully indipendent and that could be at any time taken away and immediately used for another purpose. Changing a machine with a new one is completely transparent to the whole system and done in a blink of an eye. Installing the DVI multiplexers is straight forward. So let's put it this way, my solution is not the most economical and I know that, but it was the fastest in time and the most flexible to set up, without any special piece of software other than what I perfectly know. I am used to assemble the rigs. It takes me half an hour to set up a rig when I know all components, and one more hour max to install the softwares, drivers, configure everything for crunching. This is the advantage of standardisation.
Regarding your comment on form and function It is true that I give also some importance to form. I must admit that and there is a price to pay.

You are one cruel dude! Come here and tease us with this. Only thing that comes to mind is (probably wrong) AMD! Don't give us that NDA stuff, speak up! We await the spoken secret!!!!!

Movieman, I read somewhere data on the AMD Magny Cours chip with 12 cores but it seems it is not able to beat the 980X. I may be wrong for sure. What I remember the chip is not very fast, and the fastest version is under 3 Ghz, probably 2.6 Ghz. Dunno if it does overclock well.

I never used AMD chips in all my life. I started my hardware experiences with Zilog and Motorola chips, then switched to Intel and never changed ever since. So AMD would be a new experience.
Anyway here are my conditions to bother using AMD chips in my system as a WCG cruncher:

1) It must return over 75'000 ppd / CPU air cooled
2) Energy consumption for single socket rig must be 3.2 mW/point or less.
3) Chip cost for the performance mentioned above must be 1'100 US$ max.
4) A dual socket system with 150'000 ppd and 7 mW/point air cooled should not cost more than 5'000 US$

If this four conditions are reunited than I will start seriously thinking about it. My youngest kid has a pretty old desktop, and if he does well at his exams in June I may decide to give him one of my planets to free a slot in my computer room. RA is fighting back.

Can't wait to see the info. When (if there is one) will the NDA be lifted?

On the AMD blog they mention that the Magny Cours has 4 Hypertransport links to build 4 socket systems.
I do not know what is the data channel design of the coming Xeon X56XX series. Dual socket for sure, quad sockets ?
And what about the 8 core Beckton ones. There should be also a X7XXX series with 8 cores coming in the future, at stratospheric prices we can imagine. The dust is far from having settled.