Looking at buying an i7 for home, will probably run W7. This one will have an ATI 4850. It's a D*ll, but at $800 I will probably swallow my pride and get it.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0312598&BrCs=498&BrCg=16184665&BrRc=1100257753
Folding on the GPU is easy, but I have had problems with SMP under Vista 64. Prefer to run it as a service.
I am considering dropping in a much larger power supply and adding a second GPU (baby farm!). That drives the cost up and defeats the purpose of going cheap.
What is your recommendation for SMP under V64?
I've only run SMP on XP. I tried and failed to set up Linux VMs to run SMP2 on Vista x64, but I never tried the normal SMP client. Hopefully the SMP2 client will be out soon for Windows. Linux already has SMP2, which is why people run VMs - SMP2 takes better advantage of the hardware, which means more points.
I'm participating in lots of other
DC projects so I tend to only run GPU F@H clents and use the CPU for other stuff. The i7 is a great proc, but the stock heatsink is junk, worthless for overclocking.
That Dell system looks nice, but I read that the Dell BIOS doesn't allow overclocking. If you want to overclock and plan to upgrade the PSU, etc., you might want to look into building your own. It should be possible to build a nice i7 system for less than $1000 these days. I like to build my own so I get exactly what I want. I'm happy with my Dell XPS laptop, though.