Mac Pro buying advice

[crockies99]

Hello. I have been editing on Final Cut Pro on a Macbook Pro from about 4 years ago. My Macbook pro is starting to really get bogged down by editing HD and I need to purchase a Mac Pro. I don't use Adobe After Effects, but I plan on learning and I would like to as much as possible buy one that can be useful for the future too. I edit mostly HD footage from a 7D and the Red, so my question is my budget really leans more towards the:

Quad-Core
2.8GHz "Nehalem" processor
3GB memory
1TB HD
ATI Radeon HD 5770

If I can muster up the extra cash is it worth it to buy the:

8-Core
Two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core "Westmere" processors
6GB memory
1TB HD
ATI Radeon HD 5770

My thinking is if I buy the 8 core I can take advantage of software that I learn or currently use that can actually take advantage of the Two Quad-core processors. Am I right on that? Or is there another alternative I am missing? Thanks for any help!

 

[Hellhammer]

This has been discussed several times. If you can afford the 6-core (3699$ IIRC), go for it. The issue with 8-core is its low clock speed and while some, if not most apps are single-threaded (like Final Cut), it's pretty slow at them, slower than the quad core. 6-core will get you the best of both worlds as it has clock speed of 3.33GHz and still 6 cores and actually offers more raw CPU power than the 8-core.