RE: The Eternal Conflict Between Altruistic Science and The Bottom Line - Gridcoin and BOINC
The best place to talk about that would probably be the #crunch-tinkering channel on the Gridcoin Slack channel. It is a channel where we discuss hardware and project choices to min/max daily research output and GRC yield. It also plays host to build projects of some very cool research rigs.
You can definitely increase the output of your machines! The first thing to do is make sure each has a GPU project and a CPU project, and making sure that you do no CPU-only work for the GPU project, as CPUs cannot compete.
For the CPU project, something like TN-Grid is good as it has low competition at the moment. For your GPU, you say you are running Milkyway. Unless you have a GPU from a very specific set of families that have excellent double precision performance, you will earn almost nothing there. The best GPU project right now for any card that does not excel at double precision is Enigma@Home.