Folding Forum

I looked around for the most powerful desktop and settled on the Mac Pro.
Here are the specs (i configured a few):

Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
2GB (2x1GB)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB or 4 x ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB

Whats the power guys?

Two ridiculously powerful processors and nice graphic cards.
I dont think I can buy since this setup costs like $3500. Seems cheaper if someone were to build it but I cant build computers myself. Awful at it. I feel proud when i can open up the desktop and clean out the dust and thats the best i can do.
This and two PS3 with home desktops running would be a pretty good small farm

Way too expensive for the PPD it'll produce ...

All of our desktops in our lab are 4-core or 8-core Mac Pros. They do very well with the OSX SMP client.

PPD ? PPD / $ ?

There's 2 questions here. Does it run well and does it produce the best PPD. I'm addressing the former and you're interested in the latter.

Always

But I still think that PPD is always the best way (for us, folders) to compare similar machines (ie : Linux/OSX SMP client). And the PPD/$ is a good indicator for the "investment" (don't forget to add 3 year of power cost in the machine cost).

True, but note that not all folders are farmers. Some want to do something else in addition to folding with their machine If that's the case, one might want to buy something like a Mac pro (over a white box running linux or Windows) based on the other apps they want to run, etc.

I thought SMP didn't scale beyond 4 cores, do you run two clients on those boxes?

Also, what are your plans regarding scaling for Intel's Nehalem, will we have to turn off simultaneous multithreading or will it be SMT aware? I saw a benchmark in which SMT yielded a 2x improvement in BOINC WCG. It can't be all that bad, can it?

It also makes more sense to buy 3 good Quad Core machines with a good Graphics cards to run GPU client on it also.
Rather than one machine.