Okay, so around the beginning of next year, I plan to build a new computer with as many video cards attached to the motherboard as possible, using x1 risers to mitigate the space issue. So far, I've found a motherboard that can handle 7 cards at once.

Now my question is about what you folks would recommend I use as cards. These would all be dedicated to BOINC. I'm interested in both the most powerful, and ones that are good value for money, just so I can compare performance and price differences.

I don't have a budget just yet, but I'm guessing a good 4 or 5 grand should suffice for the entire build.

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It will largely depend on what project(s) you want to crunch for, the way GPU support is right now means that some projects have an affinity for one card over another.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Ahh, I'm sort of doing a bit of everything. Alongside BOINC applications, there's also F@H.

When you say affinity for one card over another, do you mean actual models, or do you mean ATI/AMD over nVidia or vice versa?

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Both. Some projects have no support or better support for either ATI, nVidia or OpenCL, and due to the varied use of the cards at the projects some specific cards just seem to be better producers than others. You could use WUprop to compare cards for the projects you're interested in, and verify compatibility.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Ahh yes, I completely forgot about WUProp! I'll take a look through that.

Running the numbers on finances, I might be able to go for 290s though, so maybe it won't matter too much about value for money.

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You should consider utility costs as well; if I let my 280X go at full tilt (with one CPU core paused to allow for the GPU overhead) the system draws 400 W. With CPU running full-tilt (thus 'starving' the GPU) it only runs 150-200 W. But, if you've got the funds--go for it. Since I'm trying to reduce my energy bill as of late, I generally only have it running when I'm around and put it to sleep when I'm not. I do have one system that is running 24/7, which is my DVR--which will soon be getting my old HD 4670.

I suspect it will also be nice to have running come winter :P

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Wow, you're really ambitious to spend that much money dedicated to BOINC. I got a graphics card that I knew would work well with the projects I run, but I mainly bought it because I needed one.

Out of personal opinion, I would go with AMD. They seem to have good prices and performance.