Computer recommendation for serious number crunching

I have a few Macs of various models ( iMac, MBP, 2 x mac mini) which are all great for general work up to and including LR4, Photomatix pro etc etc.
However, I'm now doing quite a lot of multi image stitching and find that processing times are starting to to get rather long. I therefore need a powerful number cruncher to dedicate to this and all other processor intensive tasks. I naturally thought of a Mac Pro but a well spec'd machine is very expensive. Although I prefer Macs, I'm happy to have a windows machine dedicated to this task if it saves money. It goes without saying that I need a lot of RAM but what other specs should I be looking for? Anybody got any specific recommendations?

Hackintosh? At least all your software would run on it, without having to get a new license for PS for instance…

What program are you using? When you are stitching does it use multiple threads of the processor or just slam one?

Whats your budget?

PS licenses can be transferred between platforms. Hackintosh sounds like a good option for someone who wants to stay with Mac but get cheaper hardware.

I have the feeling that a i5 processor and 16GB of RAM would be plenty. I doubt you'd need the extra cores of the i7 processor, and 32GB of RAM would probably be overkill unless you're doing huge panos.

Run a pano, see what's in short supply, disk, cpu, or ram. If it's mostly waiting for disk then a simple SSD upgrade for $200 might be all you need.

If not a Mac Pro, go Hack using 6 core i7 and a X79 motherboard.

Thanks,

My i7 MBP struggles with stitching full size jpegs from my 5D3 in PTGui and is very slow with Zerene Stacker also but I only have 4 gig Ram. I'll investigate maxing the RAM first then will look at a Hack, which tbh I've always rather fancied... Will let you know how I get on...

An SSD would work wonders. It's nowhere near as fast as RAM, but it's hugely faster than a hard disk.