Single Quad Core - Can You Add Another Quad Later?

[Eidorian]

anybody know how much of performance loss one cpu will be? I'm not doing any video/image stuff, i mainly code and would like to play games. From what i know about gaming on windows, is that most if not all games won't use all 4 cores let alone 2 quad cores. I could be completely wrong, but anybody have any insight to this, thanks

Currently more cores are most beneficial for video encoding and 3D rendering.

There are still very few games that take advantage of quad cores right now. You can still get by with a dual core for gaming but at the price a quad core comes at right now you might as well go quad.

Q6600 > E6850

 

[brendon2020]

Currently more cores are most beneficial for video encoding and 3D rendering.

There are still very few games that take advantage of quad cores right now. You can still get by with a dual core for gaming but at the price a quad core comes at right now you might as well go quad.

Q6600 > E6850

so are you saying to go with dual quad or just a single quad as i'm not doing any encoding/3d rendering and won't see any performance increase when it comes to gaming/coding?

Side question though, what about running fusion/parallels would that require/run better with 2 quads vs 1?

 

[ceres]

anybody know how much of performance loss one cpu will be? I'm not doing any video/image stuff, i mainly code and would like to play games. From what i know about gaming on windows, is that most if not all games won't use all 4 cores let alone 2 quad cores. I could be completely wrong, but anybody have any insight to this, thanks

Current games don´t tap the full potential of quad core machines.
An octo machine would be a waste right now for gaming. Things might change but probably only in regards to quad core computing because apart from "skulltrail" there won´t be any octo gaming platform out there for quite some moons. The games that currently have "some" support for quad core cpus deliver only a marginal plus over dual core systems. This might change this year however. By far more important is the right video card.

 

[Eidorian]

so are you saying to go with dual quad or just a single quad as i'm not doing any encoding/3d rendering and won't see any performance increase when it comes to gaming/coding?

Side question though, what about running fusion/parallels would that require/run better with 2 quads vs 1?

You're not going to notice any additional performance in games for a year or two. I've found a games that support dual cores but mostly for physics effects or audio.

The benefit of many cores right now which games are still slow to catch up is running many tasks in parallel. In essence you get multiple computers and their CPU time but now on one machine.

Parallels is still a single processor virtual machine and VMWare Fusion can use two cores. You'd still have at least another 2 CPU cores to play with.

You're going to run into a bottleneck much more quickly from the hard drive or optical drive.

 

[brendon2020]

thanks for the info guys.

 

[Pressure]

anybody know how much of performance loss one cpu will be? I'm not doing any video/image stuff, i mainly code and would like to play games. From what i know about gaming on windows, is that most if not all games won't use all 4 cores let alone 2 quad cores. I could be completely wrong, but anybody have any insight to this, thanks

Games are becoming more and more multi-processor aware as they will not increase that much more in speed but rather rely on more cores.

 

[bobsbarricades]

what about people like me that are big audio heads and need a solid production machine - I still want to know if I can upgrade to 8-core in the future!!

 

[akm3]

Theory question:

If you have an 8 core mac with 8 gigs of ram and a 2600xt and 8800gt, second hard drive for the windows install, can you assign 2/4 cores and 4gigs of RAM to VMWare or Parallels and have it run full blown 3d games simulatanously with all sorts of Mac Processes (say rendering something in Motion, with it's own dedicated 4 cores) and have it run equivalently as speedy as if you'd booted into Bootcamp?

Obviously there are other subsystems (memory busses, etc) that would get stretched in this, but if the windows applications aren't multithreaded (most games aren't), and you have the video card dedicated to the windows side (can you do this?) would it work?

I don't know why I'd want to do this, I'm just trying to get a grasp on what the Mac pro can REALLY do.

 

[schalliol]

A month later, does anyone know whether the single processor 2008 Mac Pros ship with a single socket motherboard, or a dual? I assume that if it's a dual socket motherboard that you can add another CPU, but it would be great if someone could confirm that.

 

[Eidorian]

A month later, does anyone know whether the single processor 2008 Mac Pros ship with a single socket motherboard, or a dual? I assume that if it's a dual socket motherboard that you can add another CPU, but it would be great if someone could confirm that.

I think this is the closest we got to confirming this.

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/4808524/

 

[iToaster]

That's great, it seems as if it is upgradable. I'm just wondering where I can get the Apple heat sink? Will the one from the last gen. Mac Pro work?

 

[Mr.PS]

You can add a second processor, but you most likely never will. Finding the processor for cheap and a matching heat sink then going thru the burden of applying thermal paste, removing the spacer, and being careful enough not to screw up anything in the process far outweighs the $500 dollar investment when ordering a Mac Pro.

Get the 8 core you will not regret it!

 

[jb60606]

buy the dual cpu, and take the standard 2GB of RAM. Double the ram with after market goodness.