I'm very interested in contributing more to these projects. With that said, instead of hammering my current desktop workstation I was kicking around the idea of buying/building a dedicated server for BOINC projects. There are a number of great deals on the dell factory outlet that would be great for a dedicated BOINC box, but here is my question:

What would be a better choice for processors? Going with something like a dual 4/8 core xeon system or with a single high end multi-core processor like the i7?

Or to even make it more simple of a question, would a Xeon be better or worse than something like an i7?

Also, would a SSD drive make any difference over a regular SATA drive? It does not seem like these projects use a ton of ram (I'm currently running 6GB and I never see more than 2-3GB used with any of these projects. So would the lower latency of a SSD make any difference?

If you had the chance to build a dedicated BOINC server what would you choose and why?

Thanks!

What would be a better choice for processors? Going with something like a dual 4/8 core xeon system or with a single high end multi-core processor like the i7?

It depends on how much money you want to throw at it. We can't decide for you.
What is better? Depends on if you want a high RAC any time soon. Lots of CPUs (real and hyperthreaded), lots of GPUs. It's your decision.

Also, would a SSD drive make any difference over a regular SATA drive? It does not seem like these projects use a ton of ram (I'm currently running 6GB and I never see more than 2-3GB used with any of these projects. So would the lower latency of a SSD make any difference?

Uhm, Random Access Memory and a hard drive (7,200 RPM, 10,000 RPM or Solid State Drive, IDE or SATA) aren't the same thing. You can put a very big hard drive (several terabytes) in a system and not have it boot up since you neglected to add any memory to it.

Project science programs run in memory and read their information from and write their information to disk. BOINC will run in memory and read its state from and write it back to disk every so often. Less often than it did in the past, but still several times a minute.

Will it matter with regards to what kind of hard drive you go for? I don't think so.

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