Hi, posted this here as opposed to General as its related specifically to folding (and I don't wan't a dozen people telling me to go i5 for gaming 
).
I recently took up folding because I figured it would be a cool thing to do with an old machine that could run 24/7 in my work office. The machine was an i3 540 system OC'd to 3.8GHz with a 7800GTX and produced north of 5K+ PPD, all was good, until the bug/addiction started to come in, I swapped the 780GTX for a spare 9600GSO I had at home which took my combined PPD up to 7.5K+. Enthused by this I bought a GTX470 off the members market for £67.50 which has raised my combined PPD to 15-17K.
That's where we are now but I have the urge to go higher (despite the system now being ahead of most of the systems my friends show up to LAN partys with). Looking on eBay the s1156 i7's go for around the £80 mark, compared to the i3 540 the i7 870 has literally twice the cores/cache (both have HT) so when clocked the same should give twice the PPD? If that is correct then it would be equal to £80 for 5K+ PPD which is a lower £-PPD ratio than the GPU netted me.
I would also have the option of selling the i3 along with the mobo and ram and acquiring something else. (I have 4x4GB DDR3 1333 sticks lying around and will soon be getting a spare Asrock FM2 board).
Any advice pls? my current board is a Gigabyte P55-USB3 so can take another GPU as well as any s1156 i7.
).I recently took up folding because I figured it would be a cool thing to do with an old machine that could run 24/7 in my work office. The machine was an i3 540 system OC'd to 3.8GHz with a 7800GTX and produced north of 5K+ PPD, all was good, until the bug/addiction started to come in, I swapped the 780GTX for a spare 9600GSO I had at home which took my combined PPD up to 7.5K+. Enthused by this I bought a GTX470 off the members market for £67.50 which has raised my combined PPD to 15-17K.
That's where we are now but I have the urge to go higher (despite the system now being ahead of most of the systems my friends show up to LAN partys with). Looking on eBay the s1156 i7's go for around the £80 mark, compared to the i3 540 the i7 870 has literally twice the cores/cache (both have HT) so when clocked the same should give twice the PPD? If that is correct then it would be equal to £80 for 5K+ PPD which is a lower £-PPD ratio than the GPU netted me.
I would also have the option of selling the i3 along with the mobo and ram and acquiring something else. (I have 4x4GB DDR3 1333 sticks lying around and will soon be getting a spare Asrock FM2 board).
Any advice pls? my current board is a Gigabyte P55-USB3 so can take another GPU as well as any s1156 i7.