Originally posted by macrumors12345
Yeah, it is also going to add a non-trivial amount to your power bill if you are running on an P4 or highly clocked Athlon. Those things are power sucking monsters...if you're running it with one of them then you are literally paying about $100/year extra to do this! Of course, dual 970s will consume about as much power as a single P4 or Athlon, albeit at least you will be getting much more work done with the two 970s (assuming the PPC version of the client isn't horribly coded at that point). In some sense, this program is best run on laptops, which get much more work done per watt than a desktop CPU. It would be nice if you could, for example, lower the voltage on a PowerMac's processor(s) (like you can lower the clock speed on an iBook or Powerbook when running on battery), so that you can run the client all day without having it add too much to your electricity bill....
