[Bones]

My take is that if you stay at it and really make an effort regardless of what you have, it shoudn't matter what hardware you use - Old, new or whatever floats your boat.

Remember that everyone of us started with the same amount of boints - 0 and we went from there. All of us did what we had to do to earn our boints and it paid off.

Time is another factor involved. If you stay at it long enough, you'll earn the boints and those will accumilate regardless of what you used before to get them. That's also part of the deal and why I disagree with a boints cap. If I had let those with 200+ boints or more deter me in the first place, I woudn't have what I do now. If your heart is in it and you are determined, you will succeed and eventually earn a place among those at the top. Even if one should never reach the top, at least you would have given your best effort since no one is guaranteed to succeed by trying but guaranteed to fail if they don't.
Time spent doing it and learning how to make your system run better is what it really takes. Whether a newcomer sticks with it or not tells alot about the individual. If they are serious about it, they will stay with it and not let something as simple as boints scare them away.

Again, I remind you we all began with 0 boints and there were plenty of others with a butt-load of boints ahead of us when we started. Didn't stop us and I actually feel these newcomers should earn their place as we had to or just go home.
That may sound bad or even cruel as stated but it's the reality of what we all had to face when we started and they should have to do it the same way under the same conditions to earn their place too. It's only fair they do as we had to for earning the boints.

As to hardware used, I don't look down on anybody that's benched a laptop or whatever to earn boints since if it earned them, fine by me. I can agree it may look silly for a laptop to beatout some other systems but then again, it's about what you can do with what you have to do it with.

As to newer stuff, you guys know I have an AM3 with a 720BE and yes, I've benched with it and posted up at the bot with it along with a 754 and 939 system too. Whatever it takes to get boints is what I'll do and if I never manage to score another boint, at least I did try.