rix187 Posted July 24, 2010 Share Posted July 24, 2010 I have been wanting a Mac Pro for a while now with the video editing that I do. I have been using a PC with an Intel i7 920 Processor and 6gb of ram. The used Mac Pro that I was looking at getting has Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series "Harpertown" Processors and 4gb of ram. Would this be a downgrade as far as rendering times and things like that would go? Should I just wait for the new macs to come out and get one of the current models when they do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danielkza Posted July 25, 2010 Share Posted July 25, 2010 Those 5400's are Core 2s, so they lose quite a bit on performance-per-clock. If the Geekbench scores are right, with 12% more clock and 2x the number of cores, the MacPro you mentioned has about 20% and 40% more performance in integer and floating point calculations, respectively, but half the memory performance. And you still need to take into account it has 50% less RAM. So, I have two recommendations to you. The first and cheaper one would be overclocking. An i7 920 running @ 3.2GHz, matches the MacPro in CPU performance, while keeping double the memory bandwidth. You can go way beyond that with some moderate cooling. The second, while expensive, will probably help you the most with rendering times. Get yourself a 6-core i7 980X. It will seriously outperform that MacPro in pretty much every area, and has enormous OC potential. In your case, the $1000 you'd need to shell out for it will probably pay themselves in the long run. The GeekBench scores I use as reference follow. i7 920 MacPro i7 920 @ 3.2GHz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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