4 Core or 8 core?

[killswitch911]

Well my choices right now is a mac pro One 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon or Two 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon.


Witch one would be faster, and witch one would have the best performance





Also instead of making a new thread, I'll just ask this here too.

4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB or just one ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB?

 

[eddyg]

Well my choices right now is a mac pro One 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon or Two 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon.


Witch one would be faster, and witch one would have the best performance?

That's a bit of a silly question without saying what you intend to do with them isn't it.

80% of the time the quad core should feel faster. When doing intensive stuff (video encoding) the 8 core will be faster, but quite a bit.

This may all change with Snow Leopard which uses the cores more effectively.

Cheers, Ed.

 

[Sun Baked]

Also instead of making a new thread, I'll just ask this here too.

4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB or just one ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB?

On the Mac under OS X 4 Nvidia cards are seen as 4 cards capable of running 8 displays.

Nothing along the lines of 4 cards linked together on 1 display. No drivers for that. So the ATI card is best for 1 or 2 displays.

 

[killswitch911]

On the Mac under OS X 4 Nvidia cards are seen as 4 cards capable of running 8 displays.

Nothing along the lines of 4 cards linked together on 1 display. No drivers for that. So the ATI card is best for 1 or 2 displays.

So the 4 Nvideo cards would not work together, kinda as one?

 

[Exegesis48]

No offense intended, but the fact that you're asking this question on a forum leads me to believe that you don't currently even know what to do with a quad core Mac. I know i would personally be hard pressed to put that much computing power to good use on a regular basis. Unless you're a video editor or programmer for 3D applications, I highly doubt you will need more than a Quad Core Mac. Also as another poster mentioned, Leopard does not currently readily utilize all 8 cores for routine applications. Snow Leopard will better share the workload though.

If budget is of no concern to you, buy the 8 core mac, at least you'll know that you have plenty of power for a long long time to come.

 

[killswitch911]

No offense intended, but the fact that you're asking this question on a forum leads me to believe that you don't currently even know what to do with a quad core Mac. I know i would personally be hard pressed to put that much computing power to good use on a regular basis. Unless you're a video editor or programmer for 3D applications, I highly doubt you will need more than a Quad Core Mac. Also as another poster mentioned, Leopard does not currently readily utilize all 8 cores for routine applications. Snow Leopard will better share the workload though.

If budget is of no concern to you, buy the 8 core mac, at least you'll know that you have plenty of power for a long long time to come.

I already have a nice 2.66 quad core PC, with 8 GB of a ram (and indeed I do web design, but photoshop runs fine on this PC) and all that jazz, but I want a mac. If Im going to upgrade to a mac, I might as well just do a big upgrade as Im already spending a lot of money. I'm just trying to figure out what would be best, thats all.

 

[Exegesis48]

You would definitely see a huge benefit from switching to Mac. I'm not trying to sound all fanboy on you, but a Quad Core Mac Pro vs a Quad Core PC is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Mac OS X makes much better use of the multi-core architecture, and you will definitely feel the difference, Quad Core or Octo Core.

(i'd personally be forced to go with the Quad Core, as I am constantly budgeting every penny in my life, and I'd rather have extra money to spend on peripherals than to just blow it all on the computer itself.)

 

[300D]

Besides, your PC isn't really using more than 3 of your 6GB anyways.

 

[Tesselator]

If he has the 64-bit OS on his PC it does. And PC is just as fast and making just as much use of the multiple cores as the Mac. Actually more on the PC. There's a LOT more available on a PC that is multicore aware than there is on a Mac - so these comments could only come out of fan-boy-ism. I still like Mac better but not for those (untrue) reasons.

Anyway, eddyg answered your original question best.

 

[killswitch911]

After asking a few other people about the graphic cards, and interesting question raised. Does the mac pro Nvidia cards have SLI?

 

[300D]

Not when using OSX.

 

[Cindori]

The mac pro motherboard does not support SLI at all..

 

[Chad H]

I was under the same dilemma. I went with the 2.66Ghz quad and haven't looked back. I ordered mine with the ATI card and 2 super drives. I game and do some HD video editing. This machine is a beast. I had an early '08 8 core and this machine is alot better in my opinion. It geek benched higher anyway(8455). I just have one HDD in it right now (Western Digital 1.5TB) and 8GB of RAM. I got told to hold out for the ATI because the Nvidia card was crap and Im extremely happy I did. It performs really well but again I do game alot. But it all comes down if you really need the power. I didn't need 8 cores so I saved the money and got the quad allowing me to put more ram in it and more HDD's. Well hope that rambling helped...a little.