I think skylake is worth waiting for as it's so near, and there's not likely to be anything better arriving for quite a while after because AMD's Zen chips aren't due until some time in 2016 and Intel are apparently struggling with the next generation (which would normally be a shrink to 10nm but my understanding is that that is likely to be delayed).

If your budget will stretch to a cheap skylake based quad core then I'd recommend that, and if you can't, you might be able to pick up a sandy or ivy bridge quad core cheap 2nd hand although the top end chips tend to be over priced on ebay.

You may already be fully aware, but in case not, one of the most important things is the PSU fit stability and efficiency. For some reason most PSUs are massively overpowered for systems with an integrated GPU. I'd recommend something by seasonic if possible although fsp, corsair and antec do some good ones. The antec earthwatts was always good value bit I don't know if it's still available.

Hey,

I am thinking of putting together a new computer. Money wise it looks like AMD might be a better choice (according to cpubenchmark.net). However, AMD power consumption seems to be much higher.

Since I am planning to be running BOINC in the background, I wonder if it is possible that the money I save initially, will be lost later on the electricity bills.

Any advice?

Hi

Yes, you're right. On a work-per-watt basis, Intel are way ahead at the moment, although AMD's Carrizo might help close the gap somewhat, I don't think anyone expects it to catch the existing Intel CPUs (although this is ignoring AMD's superior GPU capabilities).

If you are looking at a high-end system for gaming then you might be best off waiting for Intel's Skylake - the Core-i5-6600K or Core-i5-6600 which should be released at the start of August, and hopefully some of the cheaper variants too.

If you want something cheaper for office use then I highly recommend the Pentium G3250 (£45 in the UK). It's based on Haswell and is effectively half of an i5 (so two cores), but it is unlocked so I'm running mine at 4GHz with the standard heatsink and it's still very quiet and performs similarly on Rosetta to my two quad-core Q6600 (which are quite old now!).

D

Since the BOINC Manager is just organizing the work, and the real processing work is done within the various project applications (such as Rosetta), it isn't going to gain you much. And to answer your next question, no the Rosetta source is not available.

You might also confirm how you have your computing preferences set in the BOINC Manager. It has a setting for the percentage of available CPUs you want BOINC to use, there is also a setting for the percentage of CPU time (across all of the processors) you wish to use.