I've been wanting a 955 for my GD70 and had planed on getting one this week. Then I found what I hope to be a cheap, low power and cool cruncher. The 955 will have to wait, prices will only go down anyway.

I ordered a $75 Opteron 1354 on Newegg. All dressed up and ready to test it but I am guessing I won't see the CPU till Monday. Whenever they ship from NJ warehouse UPS sits on it a few days.

Going to see if the 1354 will work on a MSI DKA790GX and a Biostar 520 A2. It is a AM2 chip. I also ordered a $49 GigaByte MA74GM-S2 as GigaByte AM2 and AM2+ boards seem to recognize Opterons, from Newegg reviews and AMD forums. If the chip works on the MSI or Biostar I will probably get another 1354. At 2.2gz it might not be a great cruncher but at $75 and 75 watts it shouldn't be bad either. I am hoping for a 2.5gz OC but this is my first Opteron so do not know what to expect. The Gigabyte has the 740G and SB700, don't know how it OCs either.

When the Opteron shows up I will get KillAWatt full load readings on all boards it runs on. In another thread rcofell mentioned a Ubuntu distro made for Boinc that can run diskless using a NFS server or diskless using a USB stick. The USB idea sounds cheap and easy so I will try it first.

If you have extra PSUs, DDR2 memory, dish drives or USB drives, this can be a real cheap cruncher. $125 + shipping and maybe tax for a quard-core 2.2gz CPU and MB might not be a bad option for those of us on tighter budgets.

I hope to find that out and report it here.