..............................CONGRATULATIONS dubhain ON REACHING 3,000,000 MOT POINTS !!!..............................

Some great milestones recently everyone..! Good Job!

Dr. Mike

The i7 3820 processor that's in my computer is 4 cores and 8 threads. I wish it was more, but it looks like it's crunching pretty well to me. It is the only machine I have active right now. Boinc says it runs 8 tasks at a time.

I wish I knew how to configure or have one configured for me. I'd have more cores, etc. Can't seem to figure those things out or know a lot of people who do. :/

Dr. Mike

P.S. Hope this helps?

There are many BOINC based projects that will use your GPU while still using your CPU. As a rule you'll need to dedicate 1 of your 8 CPU cores to support the GPU. Some of the GPU projects are coded to automatically switch over 1 CPU core to run along side the GPU with no intervention on your part. Others will need just 1 setting changed in the Boinc Manager. Here are a few projects that support your ATI card.

POEM
Milkeyway
Einstein

You can do a Google search for more. Of the above projects I like POEM the best because they are doing protein structure medical research and it uses the least amount of resources. The other 2 are pretty GPU intensive and adequate cooling is a must.
You'll need to create an account on the website of any new project you select. Make sure you use the same e-mail address that you used when you signed up at WCG. I use the same username and password also. Keeps it simple for me.
After you create your account you can use the Boinc Manager to attach just like you did when joining WCG.
POEM and some of the other projects require you to use a 7.x.xx version of BOINC so if you're still using an older version you'll need to update. Here is the latest Berkeley recommended version. Getting your feet wet now with running GPU tasks will make it simple to transition to the WCG GPU tasks when they are launched.
Hope this helps. if you have any other questions let me know.

WOW! Seems like quite a machine! They're putting two processors on the motherboard so this is starting to sound a bit like Judson's "Frankie" box. The processor is all various speeds of 4, 6 and 8 core CPUs. You end up with 8, 12 and 16 cores with two of the processors on the MB. I compared a 6-core CPU with an 8-core of as close the same speed as I could, did a little math and the price difference is all but negligible. This is going to be more of a matter of what you can afford that anything. In the end, you'll probably be looking at $7-8K easily for the machine. Not sure if the Sandy Bridge in the name is a chip architecture or specific to this Xeon E5 processor. Usually, when I've seen Xeon in the past, it's normally been in a server (vs. end-user box). I think you'd want to get one of the Radeon video cards for now. As it looks like there are slots to add more video cards, you could always add an Nvidia down the road when more is known about how WCG will be doing GPU. I'd go with the Window 7 Ultimate for the OS (since you're not familiar with Ubuntu). I see they also offer MS Office and Norton for AV. You could get those elsewhere but sometimes it's cheaper bundled with the machine. Memory is cheap so it's mainly more of getting what the OS will support. Since you're using this as a cruncher, I wouldn't think you'd need a huge disk drive. They do offer some nice size solid state drives which can be handy for swapfile space but the default 1TB drive should be plenty of space. As for how fast a CPI to get, use the law of diminishing returns to decide this. If the next faster CPU is cheaper per added GHz, get it until it cost more than previous one. I'd get more suggestions from other folks about configuring this monster too.