Hello!
So I was going through my junk and found some hidden gems among the old AMD Athlons.
I found two motherboards which would pair quite nicely to any of the listed processors as well as 16 gb of DDR 3 ram.

Which processor would this project be best suited to? Not that it's a huge difference, but the i7 uses a bit more juice too. I'm just not sure if having 8 tasks running concurrently on the older i7 would be any more productive than the newer i5 or even the i3.

I'm going to assume that Windows would be my best bet in terms of reliably grabbing workunits?

Thoughts?

I'm going to assume that Windows would be my best bet in terms of reliably grabbing workunits?

As mentioned in a post in the Linux section,there are two model types in testing for Linux at present, both quite high on memory requirements compared to the current Windows tasks. To get the best out of one of these new task types I would say the absolute memory minimum is 4GB/core. The good news is that as long as you have an adequate swap partition they still run without crashing if you don't have that but do slow down considerably. It may well be that to have no slow down due to swapping to disk, 6 or 8GB may be needed.

I have no idea how reliable the supply of these tasks will be and I don't even know if those working at the project do yet as most work comes from Universities other than Oxford around the world.

My tendency would be to go with the i5. It's much more energy efficient than your i7, would be faster running 4 (or less) tasks, and the hyperthreading using up to 8 threads would only produce better throughput on the less memory-intensive model types. At least that's all in my estimation. I loved my i7 920 back in the day, but what a power hog.

As mentioned in a post in the Linux section,there are two model types in testing for Linux at present, both quite high on memory requirements compared to the current Windows tasks. To get the best out of one of these new task types I would say the absolute memory minimum is 4GB/core. The good news is that as long as you have an adequate swap partition they still run without crashing if you don't have that but do slow down considerably. It may well be that to have no slow down due to swapping to disk, 6 or 8GB may be needed.

I have no idea how reliable the supply of these tasks will be and I don't even know if those working at the project do yet as most work comes from Universities other than Oxford around the world.

Well this would be on an older 500 gb Sata II hard drive, so that would definitely be a huge issue if it started hitting swap. I guess I'll have to find a Windows 7 product key which I think I still have somewhere around here so I can at least get reliable workunits.

My tendency would be to go with the i5. It's much more energy efficient than your i7, would be faster running 4 (or less) tasks, and the hyperthreading using up to 8 threads would only produce better throughput on the less memory-intensive model types. At least that's all in my estimation. I loved my i7 920 back in the day, but what a power hog.

That was my thought process too. I've got an AMD Ryzen 7 1800x here which I would love to run CPD on, but I'm pretty sure I'd hit that 16 gb of ram far too easily. That being said I haven't actually tested CPD out with the various WUs to see how much each uses per slot. I could probably find 32 gb of ram for fairly cheap these days, but really, is an extra 4 threads on the i7 (and slower threads, at that) really worth it?

As a side note OS wise, I've got a laptop running Linux (Ubuntu 16.04) and right now it's gotten completely full on /boot with absolutely no way to make more room, giving me an error every time I attempt to install/fix packages, so this is making me want to run Linux even less. It is nice when it works for crunching, though - those extra CPU cycles that Windows takes up with background scanning do make a difference, but if it means I'll get fairly reliable work for CPD, at least for now, I'm definitely in.

I've got an AMD Ryzen 7 1800x here which I would love to run CPD on, but I'm pretty sure I'd hit that 16 gb of ram far too easily.

I used nine (out of twelve) cores on a Ryzen 2600 with 16 GB of memory with plenty to spare (Win10). The reason I limited it to nine cores was for performance, not memory use.
I think you could use at least 12 out of the 16 cores on a Ryzen 1800X without problems. Just set the BOINC preferences to "Use at most 75% of the CPUs".