Which Processor is Better?

I think the 8 core is a smoking machine for the price right now, especially since it gives you an extra 4 DIMM slots (or 3 if you are doing 3x channel).

Get a slightly faster machine with the current SW and such with the 6 core, but if you plan on keeping it around awhile -- you'd likely welcome the extra memory space over the long haul.

As with most stuff, the more cores at slower speed will come into play as more apps become Snow Leopard aware (aka, those apps in Cocoa that require 10.6+).

Right now we still have a lot of 10.3/10.4 apps out there and some still in carbon which tend to work better with higher MHz.

But as with most things Apple, more cores/CPU at lower MHz tend to become the speed champs near their EOL (aka in 3-5 years).

 

What are you doing with it?

If you are doing tasks that use multiple cores (video conversion) or multiple single cores tasks at the same time - the more cores the merrier.

If you are just doing single core stuff (like some games) then generally the fastest core you can get is what you want.

 

^^^ What he said.

I wish we could collect some of the posts together into a sticky... I'm getting weary of reposting the same stuff in thread after thread.