Curious if it matters if doing a partial boil, you boil say 2 gallons or 4 gallsons, will the end result be any different? If so, why? At the end the day, you hope to ferment ~5 gallons, so I don't get how boiled amount would matter at all, no matter what you boil, it will be dilluted to 5 gals right?
It does matter. Smaller amount boiled will lead to more carmelization of the extract and a darker color. Even more important than that, with smaller boil you'll get less bittering from your hops because of the higher gravity.
Imagine trying to fit 6lbs of malt into 2 gallons of water and boiling for an hour, you would pretty much be back to LME but a lot more carmelized.
Hops won't be utilized nearly as well like Iowa said.
Check out on of the brew programs to see what the difference REALLY is. I use brewsmith and they have a free trial so you can check it out, works great for me.
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The two above hit it on the head. You can still make good beers from partial boils (I often only boil 1.5g), but it is difficult to get a light color without late extract additions. Further, you can only get the beer so bitter with such a small boil. You can make up for lower hop utilizations by increasing amount of hops or length or boil (or doing a late addition with only hops in water for the first 30 minutes). On hop utilization though, ultimately there is a maximum (I believe 90IBU soluable into a solution for a 5% beer) limit; thus once diluted you would be decreasing that(i.e. 90IBU max in 1.5g dilutes to 27IBU in 5g). You can make up for this by brewing the recipe in 1.5-2g and brewing a hop tea with another 1.5-3.5g (i.e. hop just water...). I'll post a link to a post on this last subject.
When doing partial boil, does amount matter?
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