Well, shoot... If I had known this, I would've spent more time on CFSW--probably could've gotten sapphire, had I not cut out at Emerald to chase badges for HFCC and HCC. At the time, they had both shown on Sek's charts as only having (IIRC) around 90 days each.

Oh, well. It's not as sore a spot as my Rice badge, where I was less than two days short of Sapphire. By my own hand--got too overzealous with canceling what I thought were unneeded WUs.

As for today, updated All-WCG graph shows 172 days. Crunch on!

I'm still running.........sharing resources with GFAM and Folding (Alzheimer's and Parkinson's ).

I don't think you need anywhere near that amount for WCG to crunch HCC-GPU.

Just look at my average ppd for my hosts . The top 2 machines both have 2 overclocked HD7950 cards in them, but you can see one is a dual socket octo core Xeon with 32 threads and the other is just an i-7 2600k with 8 threads. The difference is only about 40k ppd - which is substantial, but not as substantial as the difference in what it cost to build each rig.

I bought the octo core chips used and they were engineering samples at that and they still cost me about $700+ each. The motherboard was probably about twice what I would have paid for an 1155 mobo. And on and on. ECC reg'ed memory, E-ATX case, PSU, etc. Then there was the limited choice of cooling options, etc.

So to build a rig that can put out over 100k ppd for HCC-GPU you need

1. 2 HD 7950, oc'ed to about 900-950mhz - this will run you about $350-400 each for the Powercolor models which I prefer. I have six cards (one still in the box) so far between the 7950's and 7870's. They're the most expensive but I've never had a problem with Powercolor.

2. any 4 core, i7 system with at least 2 PCI-E x16 gen 3 slots. You can run the cards in gen 2 slots, but gen 3 should work better. Obviously the cost here can vary widely, but for the m/b, mem, and cpu I think you can probably get away with under a grand pretty easily.

Of course you will need a PSU that has at least 2 PCI-E 6+6 pin molex connectors since each card takes 2 6 pin power connectors. If you get the 7970, you'll need 6+6+2 since one is an 8 pin and one is 6. But actually the card comes with a 6pin to 8 pin adapter so that's probably optional.

PSU's in that league are going to be at least in the 700watt range I would guess. I've been going 750-850w. I've found that Antec makes 2 very nice PSU's in this range for about $200 on Amazon.

edit: Just bear in mind that after the HCC-GPU part is exhausted, such a rig will probably only put out about 5-6k ppd. All of those pts you're generating in the mean time are coming from the GPU's.

Yeah, amazing - right?

edit: I just made and deleted an edit - just a note to anyone wondering what changed.

You need to look at the requirements of the projects to be crunched to insure you have the minimum to crunch them. Some GPU projects require double precision cards while others require either Nvidia or AMD. Then decide how much faster you want them crunched. Faster crunching completion times require faster equipment. Then decide on how many crunchers you want to monitor. For me, I decided to build dual processor machines to reduce the number to monitor. Instead of 4 crunchers, I have 2 dual hex crunchers. Pricey but to me, worth it. Some projects crunch better in linux while others prefer windows. Remember it costs money to run these crunchers. Older technology uses more electricity. The newer processors and such are more energy efficient.
Suggest you build or buy one, see how well you like it and performance you get out of it. If you want another, adjust from your 1st cruncher. Cheaper to build though. Watch for sales from newegg and other sites, buy used on some things.
Good luck on your quest. Let us know what you get/build.