title says it all. is it really worth switching to a blank-screen screensaver or not?

Depends on which project. The most intensive one is CPDN one. BOINC tries to limit the percentage of CPU the screensaver uses, and this was improved even more on recent BOINC versions.

Most BOINC screensavers (if not all) use your graphics card more than your CPU, so it won't really make your computing slower.

Do you happen to know anything about the projects lhc, ralph, rosetta and einstein?
Thanks!

--Ben

I think it's worth using the blank screen. I've always run it like that. After all, screensavers aren't really needed these days anyhow and any computation wasted on drawing a pretty picture on the screen is waste in my opinion. However, I do like being able to manually popup the graphics every once in a while to check on things... like for CPDN.