Reward
Is lower than the price of a card they could (theoretically at least, I know there are protections in there) have burned?
Excitement reigned at the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge Cluster Competition as Zhejiang University set a new student LINPACK record with 12.03 Tflop/s. With this result, they eclipsed the previous record of 10.78 Tflop/s set by Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI) at last year’s ISC15 competition. Here's a historical …
You're thinking "sustained" and not "world record". Which is always a misleading thing about records of any kind. If you're going for wr, you go for broke, pushing it to the near edge of failure. If you go for sustained, you sometimes even push it DOWN just in case.
Not sure about current GPU trends as i quit that long ago, but on the CPU front, atm you're basically limited by mobo and psu build quality. Sadly, wifi and flashy neons are a much easier sell to punters than decent quality power.... There's a small niche market there,but no takers i guess.