My new hardware dilemma

[Mr. Hankey]

I went through this process myself, if its all about the points then it has to be about the GPU. what I came up with was essentially two things.

1. If I wanted to add personal capacity, then I wanted to build the most cost effective but quality boxes I could and then put 2 GPUs in them. My target was the $500 for the box and $600 for the two GPUs. I have 3 of these boxes so far + my gaming rig where I always go highend.

2. The most cost effective way to get points to the team / my dollars, was to buy gpus for team members that had empty slots.

Once you have as many boxes as you want you can then upgrade the GPUs (and occasionally the PSU) in them to keep them crunching and give away the gpus you are replacing. I gave away one of the complete cpu/ 2-gpu boxes, and then an additional 3 gpus so far. I am getting itchy to upgrade my gaming rig, so I might end up with a 5th box soon...

[DrPop]

Thanks for the personal insight, Mr. Hankey, I really appreciate it. That's essentially what I've been doing in a way the last few months - trying to distribute my hardware and/or $ around the team a bit because I cannot hope to house enough hardware myself to make us competitive.

In the future I will try to build new rigs that make the most "utility bill sense" in that the CPU, Mobo, RAM, and SSD should consume as little watts as possible while still being competitive (I mean, I'm not getting an Atom or something just because it sips electricity). The PSU must be highly efficient. Then, I will splurge on powerful GPUs and throw my electricity $ after the big credits. This would lead to less boxes with more high end GPUs in each box, I'm thinking.