My name is Dwaine and I live in beautiful sunny southern California. My primary hobbies are computers and electronics.

I built this kick ass Core i7-X980 home PC recently, and I'm using a few BOINC apps to keep it busy when I'm not using it (which is too often, I'm afraid).

I've got a cheap NVIDIA CUDA card in it (FX580) for app acceleration, but I really don't have a good feel for whether the Einstein and SETI apps are really doing much with it. I've got lots of open PCI-e slots and a big power supply, so I might add some Fermi class boards at some point, if I thought it might help.

Addendum: In May 2011, I replaced my cheap GPU with a GTX470 Fermi class GPU. Has much higher BOINC performance. Maybe this is what helped to find pulsar number 6 recently! Money well spent!

I have a boat load of IBM/Lenovo NetVista PC's with P4 class CPU's in them, that I used to have doing BOINC stuff under various Linux OS's. I thought it would be cool having lots of PC's chugging away in the garage on projects. And it WAS cool, until I got the first couple of power bills. I didn't realize how much power a dozen P4 PC's would consume running full bore 24/7. I think running the BOINC stuff on a single fast Hex core PC probably uses a bit less power. And this thing is probably faster than the dozen NetVista's anyway. Too bad power is not free! I'd love to put all those PC's back to work again.