I added an i7-940 box with a single ATI 4850 which is pumping out about 5,000 ppd. The first sets of console units will hit the points server tonight.
Are you seeing any slowdown in awarding points on GPU work units? With two GPUs I expected to be producing more than I am.
The recent GPU work units have gotten a lot bigger, and not only do they give less PPD than the older units, the PPD is more inconsistent because the units take longer to complete. For example, checking FahMon, the 511-point WUs (known to give low PPD) on my 8800GS cards only give about 2800 PPD, when I used to get over 4000 PPD. On the other hand, the new 1888-point WUs are good for around 9000 PPD on my 9800GX2, but each WU takes about 10 hours to complete. I believe the ATI cards run different WUs than the NVIDIA cards, so you can't really compare them, but they don't generate the same PPD as the NVIDIA cards. ATI keeps making improvements, so make sure you have the latest drivers.
The Core i7 chips are monsters. I've heard if you want to maximize PPD, you should set up several Linux virtual machines to run F@H, since the Linux SMP code is more optimized than the Windows code. I tried to get it working last week but kept running into problems with virtualization. You need to have a 64-bit OS. The instructions are
here.
I just saw
this post about how to lower CPU usage with ATI cards. You might want to experiment with it. More information is
here. The ATI cards usually use a lot of CPU when folding, so you have to make sure if you're running F@H on the CPU as well, that the CPU is not robbing the GPU of cycles (or vice versa).