As the title says which is better for farms at the moment?
I know the prices are dropping due to the M2 socket.
Also which mobo? needs to be cheap but be able to overclock easy enough for a novice
Warning @ DT if he reads this will be installing fedora core 5 and ltsp so you will likely get the post or PM
Also got a job at last the last one didnt last long enough! Starts thursday
Which means I can get my farm up and running! Will be doing SETI and Predictor but who else wants some help?
Folding@home
And easy to setup on both dual cores and single cores 
I think the consenus at the minute is that the dual core s939’s give a better bang for the buck of a farm, considering you have two CPU’s in one thus saving energy and money etc on the rest of the parts
for the ltsp server I’d recommend dual core, sataII disks and as much ram as you can afford. As for the board, a simple don’t overclock it with onboard graphics. Remember to run the farm your server must be as reliable as possible, and in my opnion that means running at stock.
Flipping good news your joining the farmers though 
congrats on the new job :funknana:
DT.
[2p]
If you’re starting from scratch, you might as well go AM2 (price differences are minimal as both have been forced down by Conroe) so you have an upgrade path.
As far as single vs dual core goes - it’s a no brainer as a single dual core is way cheaper to purchase and run than 2 single cores and performance differences are negligable for the most part.
From my experiences with S939, I’ve been impressed by Epox & Asus boards, whether that translates into AM2 :shrug:
[/2p]
Remember to work out the bang for buck of the system, not just the CPU. Single core chips would have to be significantly less than half the price of equivalent dual core to be worth considering. Will be further complicated if there are low end single cores that don’t yet have a dual core equivalent, and if you fancy trying luck at overclocking. Personally I wouldn’t consider single cores if you want a large farm.
Dual core has to be the way to go now. Currently, half the boxes here are s939 dualies.
As for overclocking: it’s not that scary, so long as you are not trying to invent a warp drive or similar. If you want to run a farm off a server, then keep that at stock, like DT says, the others are just begging to be wound up a bit.
The important thing to remember is the quality of the science. Find a workable o/c’d solution and then wind it back a tad. That way you can be pretty sure that you have a rocket ship that is also solid and dependable and will not screw up the science.
The other thing to think about is bandwidth consumption. On a large farm, depending on project, you can easilly wind up close to your ISP limits. For example, here on Simap during July, I downloaded 34GB of WU’s, quite apart from the normal traffic. Other projects are much easier on bandwidth, but it can force you into some compromises.
Enjoy 
If you’re planning to use dual cores as LTSP nodes , check first to see if there are any SMP kernels available yet , there were none last time I looked.