This thread is here to provide recomendations for building or buying a computer which will run folding @ home at a good speed, while not breaking the bank in terms of the electric bill and parts.

Feel free to add suitable comments to this, but try to keep random chatter out. (Yes i know i'm as bad as everyone else for that).

Processor(s):

Intel are comming out with some very high performance er watt hardware and I am sure AMD will counter this with a similar offering. In light of this you should be looking at a CPU which is using up about 30-60W for a dual core CPU as opposed to 120-135W today. eg Intel core duo(new) vs Pentium D (old)

Display(s):

LCD's are so cheap these days for 17" screen and are equivalent to a 18/19" CRT. The picture quality is good and more importantly the electric consumption is much lower as is the space taken up.

PSU:

A quality internal PSU such as made by tagan and others make power supplies that are much more efficient eg 80-90% conversion against about 30% conversion for a cheap supply. That means a cheap 400W supply could be using up to 3 times the electrical power to produce that 400W output compared to a quality supply.

Graphics Card:

If you don't need top performance either use the onboard one if it is there otherwise go for a low to mid end card without a fan. If it can run without a fan as stock it isn't using much power. Basically buy a card to suit your needs not the latest and greatest as these use a lot of pwer and generate a lot of heat.

Hard Disk(s):

A typical 15k RPM drive uses approx 15W in use and about 1W at idle. So for your typical 7200 RPM desktop drive you are looking much less than that for each drive. If you want low power and low noise then laptop drives are the way to go, and the slower they spin the less power they tend to use.

Other devices:

The more devices that are onboard that are used the less add in cards you will need so the cheaper it will be and the less electric it will consume on ancilery components and power regulation. Each add in card adds a lot of circuitry and components which will ultimately waste some amount of power:

Power saving:

Set the machine to idle components such as the HDD and graphics card when they havn't been in use for too long. About 15 minutes makes sense for a HDD to stop it spinning up and down all the time.

Form factor:

The Mini ITX and similar form factors leave much less room for expansion than the traditional ATX style form factors, however they also take up much less space. As a general rule the boards are also targeted at lower power consumption and heat generation. Many of these mini ITX systems can run from an external Power transformer with a typical power rating of 60W to 120W. That compares to 250W to about 650W for a typical ATX desktop machine.

Mini-ITX for FAH is not much good unless it's got a Pentium-M or similar.

Those VIA C3s really don't do a lot on the floating point performance side of things unfortunately.

Correct you would need a performance model, such as Pentium M or Core Duo or a new Via C5/7 CPU etc inside of a mini-ITX to do FAH well. However these sorts of CPU's will still run on a 90-120W supply as opposed to 3-400W

Definitely

Another great way of keeping cost down for yourself is to ask permission to run something at the office. Please ask permission though as some companies take a dim view to installing stuff on their equipment without permission

I also promote the client on machines for family/friends/those who I do repair jobs for. Explain what it is, why it's a good cause, and if they have teenagers and/or heavy users of the machine, the service client is excellent IMHO as it means they pay for the electricity and it works more reliably then the GUI version.

Before I forget - thanks for the tips cheezemonkhai

Don't suppose one of the admins could put this up as a sticky if they get a chance could they as the old 'leccy is only going to get more expensive