Dual Xeon vs Quadcore?

[donald duck]

Hi,

 

Please excuse me my english, its not my native language..

 

I am considering building a pc into a g5 or mac pro case, like many others did before me.

For this purpose, I am considering a dual xeon intel board due to the layout (best fit for original heatsinks).

 

But - compared to the newer CPUs like the c7 - do you think it would be absolutely insane to go out and buy dual xeon, if I told you that I am mainly a gamer, desktop-user and also work in photoshop and maya?

I am asking you, because I dont know much about Xeon..

 

Thank you in advance

[Aurora]

As far as I know, dual-socket motherboards for the Core i7 don't exist, and Nehalem-based Xeons aren't due out until later this year.

 

Regarding current Xeons, it's really up to you. If you immediately see a need for massively parallel computing like running Photoshop, Maya, and various other apps simultaneously, then yes, dual processors would be your choice.

 

What I did with my dual Xeon box is bought a dual-socket motherboard, filled it with a ton of ram, but only put one quad-core processor in it. I've run virtual machines and numerous services (Apache, FTP, NFS, CIFS, MySQL, etc.), but have yet to see all four cores constantly at even %70 usage. Maybe sometime in the future I will need a second processor, and the option to put another in is open to me.

 

Granted, for rendering and such this may not apply, but starting with just one processor and adding another if you see fit isn't a bad idea.

[donald duck]

I´m glad to hear that. I reckon, the new Nehalem-boards will be too costly for me.

 

As the market looks right now - compared to my pockets - is 800mhz on the FSB with the option of only PC6400 RAM not good enough. As you stated, you never needed more than one CPU for your works.

I will therefore choose a 1-CPU designed mobo for a Core i7 CPU.

 

Thank you very much