that said, due to my wifes new job I will be able to "get my hands", well not actual hands, as it's not mine, on a Mac Pro. From what I can read it's a pretty sick, and thought I try and use it for Seti when she is not actual working on it. Consider it as a kind of payment as most of her things are at my place anyway (cough - I pay for the electricity). Just need to teach myself some mac at some point.

Anyhow, long story short, what would / should "we" go for tech wise. Is gpu-amount of ram, still the preferred way to go when it comes to mac as well?

What I am hoping for is: *fingers crossed*
-"3.0GHz 8-core with 25MB of L3 cache" or "2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache"
-64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
-Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

Would love to get someones thoughts / ideas on this. Should / could I count on this mac with seti or some of the other interesting projects or should I rather try my own cheaper version with windows on it?

Cheers

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There are some applications now to run on the GPUs but the issues initially found with the MacPro with the dual ATIs was the amount of heat being generated.

It was literally too hot for it's own good.

A design flaw (which had been questioned when it first came out, but made obviously shortly after being brought onboard)

The solution is/was to only use 1 of the 2 GPUs for crunching.

You can still use the CPU cores for crunching, but you will need to keep an eye on the Temps or cut down the number of cores crunching at any time.

Don't get me wrong, love Macs but cooling is the name of the game with crunching.

Even with a Windows computer, you will still need to make sure the temps stay down. Desktops tend to have better air circulation than laptops.

Hope this helps

The solution is/was to only use 1 of the 2 GPUs for crunching.

You can still use the CPU cores for crunching, but you will need to keep an eye on the Temps or cut down the number of cores crunching at any time.

Don't get me wrong, love Macs but cooling is the name of the game with crunching.

Even with a Windows computer, you will still need to make sure the temps stay down. Desktops tend to have better air circulation than laptops.

Hope this helps

Bummer, thought I could go full speed with all it's capable power but in retrospect I should have suspected that being a compact machine and all.

But thank you for the feedback / input :)

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