What spec for Chess Program PC?

[ncsmn]

I've decided to pull the trigger on building a pretty decent chess machine to compete against chess machines currently on chess sites.

I will also use the software on a quest over the next year to dial in my Caro Kann defence ( which I've been playing for many years )
My current thought is to get Houdini + Aquarium

For competition sake figure I'd get the Houdini Pro which supports up to 32 cores and 32 GB of hash and NUMA-architecture
http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm

My current thought is that 4 or 8 cores is sufficient. I did look a few months back and 16/32 core machines were looking at the £3000 - £6000 range which is just too expensive.

My budget on the Hardware is more realistically un £1000... I could go more, but than think I'm starting to get into silly money for what essentially is a hobby.

Question:

for core computing / speed + analytical power.. of the following 3 considerations that I'm currently errrr considering. Which should I be putting the most and 2nd most importance on?

* Number of Cores
* RAM - figure I'll be getting 6Gig or 8GiG
* Processor Speed ( most look like 2.8 - 3.6 GHz )


many thanks in advance.

[H.G.Muller]

I would say:

1) Speed
2) Cores
3) RAM

Doubling the speed has certainly more effect than doubling the number of cores, because in computer Chess the work done by different cores tends to partly overlap. Note that the processor type alss has an impact on speed: a 2.6 GHz Pentium IV is much slower than a 1.8GHz i7. RAM has only very little impact on Chess performance.