I have recently moved all my Rosetta@home work on to a old Intel Mac Mini I had laying around.

I have a monitor that will display the screensaver because I think it is really neat when you walk into your room, you can see your computer participating in science.

My question is, does using this screensaver take cycle away from the project, and if I want to get the most out of my computational time, should I turn off the screensaver?

Thanks in advance!

The short answer is "yes"... but the difference is pretty minor. For performance, the ideal screensaver is "blank". Doesn't take CPU cycles calculating movement, color changes, etc.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I have recently moved all my Rosetta@home work on to a old Intel Mac Mini I had laying around.

(...)

My question is, does using this screensaver take cycle away from the project, and if I want to get the most out of my computational time, should I turn off the screensaver?

For maximum performance yes, you should turn the screensaver off. With default settings about 10% of your CPU cycles are used for the screensaver. If that machine won't do anything else than crunch for rosetta, you don't even need a screen (or keyboard/mouse) attached to it once you got it running (I assume it's not your only machine since it was "laying around"), saves energy. You can connect to the BOINC client over network using BOINC Manager from an other machine and most system maintance can be done over remote desktop or whatever Apple's version of it is called.

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Yes but Remote Desktop is $80

Yes but Remote Desktop is $80

Does MacOS not have such basic things included? IICR Windows has that included since NT 4.0.

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Yes but Remote Desktop is $80

Just use VNC... ;-)

Ralf