exman Posted May 1, 2008 Share Posted May 1, 2008 No point getting 8-core. There aren't many applications or tasks that can fully use all 8-cores. Even Adobe says: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/files/PSWorld...Preso_final.pdf Going over 2 cores in a system has diminishing returns. It won’t hurt, but it won’t help as much as you might think. This goes back to the speed of processors versus the bandwidth of memory. Of course, if you do radial blurs all day, more cores will almost always help. Don’t avoid getting more, of course, there just may be better ways of spending your machine budget. The performance of MacPro memory (those FB-DIMM RAM) is not as good as standard RAM. Many tasks can be done faster on a faster dualcore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 2, 2008 Share Posted May 2, 2008 More cores don't necessarily have to be used for the same task. It can help for running multiple things simultaneously (which I'm always doing). Also, more and more applications will be taking advantage of multiple cores, since right now increasing the number of cores seems to be the main way computers are increasing in speed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rezwits Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 Get a used Mac Pro 2.66 Quad off eBay for $1800 tops. Then spend $600 for 16 GBs of ram for TransInt or OtherWorld. Then spend $270 for a 8800 Nvidia from Apple for 1st Gens. The thing that is nice is that it runs 10.4.7 and all of the system ratios are perfect. 10.4.11 takes 20 seconds from statup time to automatic login... its so hot... I run 10.5.3 on mine tho hah But basically that's $2700 vs $2800 barebones 8 core or $3800 maxed out with 16 GBs and 8800. So you could get a MacBook and a Mac Pro 4 core. or just a Mac Pro 8 core... That what I am doing/did... Laters... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarahbau Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 Get a used Mac Pro 2.66 Quad off eBay for $1800 tops. Then spend $600 for 16 GBs of ram for TransInt or OtherWorld. Then spend $270 for a 8800 Nvidia from Apple for 1st Gens. The thing that is nice is that it runs 10.4.7 and all of the system ratios are perfect. 10.4.11 takes 20 seconds from statup time to automatic login... its so hot... I run 10.5.3 on mine tho hah But basically that's $2700 vs $2800 barebones 8 core or $3800 maxed out with 16 GBs and 8800. So you could get a MacBook and a Mac Pro 4 core. or just a Mac Pro 8 core... That what I am doing/did... Laters... Why not make the comparison a little bit more fair and customize the new Mac Pro to have 4 cores since that's what the used one would have? The 8800GT is also a $150 option on a new one rather than $270. You can then get 16GB of RAM for $728 from Transintl, for a total of $3177. I think I'd rather get a slightly faster new Mac Pro that still has its full warranty remaining for $3177 than a used one for $2700. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Viscaria Posted May 9, 2008 Share Posted May 9, 2008 I would definitely go for the 8 core. The only reason to pay the extra coin for the server CPUs, RAM, and chipset in the Mac Pro is that the server chipsets support two physical processors. If you don't want 8 cores, build a Hackintosh for a small fortune less. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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