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AndyX
2009-03-06, 07:21
Hi,

I've been waiting for an new Mac Pro for a long time but now can't decide which to get out of these two machines. Does anyone know which would be fastest? It would be used for Photoshop / Dreamweaver / Flash / Final Cut Studio

At the moment I have a G5 Quad 2.5GHz which is around three years old. Are these new Macs going to loads quicker than this one? I was going to go for around 12Gb memory but the quad only allows for 8Gb - will this be plenty for snow leopard? Hopefully I'd keep the machine for 2 1/2 to 3 years.

Any help would be great!

Andy

Wyatt
2009-03-06, 08:19
I don't have any advice on the CPU question, but I thought I'd chime in on your RAM question. 8 GB is plenty. Hell, 4 GB is plenty. Apple doesn't ramp up the system requirements significantly from one version of OS X to the next. Most machines that run Tiger very well will run Snow Leopard well. Basically, any Mac Pro you buy will be fine, as far as the OS is concerned.

Taskiss
2009-03-06, 08:39
Hi,

I've been waiting for an new Mac Pro for a long time but now can't decide which to get out of these two machines. Does anyone know which would be fastest? It would be used for Photoshop / Dreamweaver / Flash / Final Cut Studio

At the moment I have a G5 Quad 2.5GHz which is around three years old. Are these new Macs going to loads quicker than this one? I was going to go for around 12Gb memory but the quad only allows for 8Gb - will this be plenty for snow leopard? Hopefully I'd keep the machine for 2 1/2 to 3 years.

Any help would be great!

AndyThe fastest will still be the one with the fastest clock speed. The question is, will the applications you use multi-thread more efficiently using 8 cores than 4, and I can't see any reason they wouldn't.

And in the future I believe more cores will provide even more efficient means of executing multi-threaded applications. It's up to you to decide if that extra 5%-10% or so "oomph" is worth it for what the difference in cost is.

Moogs
2009-03-06, 09:07
In more situations than not I'd say the 4 core 2.93 GHz machine with 6GB of RAM will run better than the 8 core beast at the slower clock speed. If you were using After Effects heavily or other apps that allow you to assign cores to an app, I might go with the 8 core but that's about the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. Even running DW, Photoshop and Flash simultaneously I don't think you'd need those extra 4 cores very often. Photoshop simultaneous with Final Cut should be OK too. Not sure about Motion but I don't think you can assign RAM and Cores to it the way you can with AE (been a while since i used it).

As for what you're using now... the Nehalem 2.93 GHz machine, given enough RAM and the Radeon GPU, will blow the doors off your G5. Even the prior generation of Mac Pro (3.2 quad) would do that pretty well. So you'll definitely be in happy-town once your new Mac Pro arrives. :)

Luca
2009-03-06, 11:04
I'd say the 8-core one would be better. There are a couple other things to remember:

- Turbo Boost. These chips are designed to deactivate some of the cores and overclock the active ones in case it runs into a single-threaded task. So a slower clock speed isn't going to hurt it too much.
- Hyperthreading. The 4-core machine can actually handle 8 threads at once, and the 8-core one can handle 16 threads. So for multi-threaded tasks, the 8-core will be WAY better.

hmurchison
2009-03-06, 11:29
Knowing that Apple is heavily investing multithreading tools for the next OS update and beyond

If I had my druthers I'd go with the most cylinders i.e the 8 physical cores.

Even though they run slower with Snow Leopard and on you will have the cores utilized more effectively and thus be able to load up more apps and keep the CPU fed.

Then I'd team the 8-cores up with a fast SSD drive for my OS and applications. The extra fast latency of SSD really shows its stuff for multitasking apps.

Then you simply use this computer for a few years and then next computer you buy you'll be asking

"should I buy the 5Ghz 16-Core/32 Thread system or the 4Ghz -8-core/16 Thread system"

Not a bad place to be in.

PB PM
2009-03-06, 11:53
In more situations than not I'd say the 4 core 2.93 GHz machine with 6GB of RAM will run better than the 8 core beast at the slower clock speed. If you were using After Effects heavily or other apps that allow you to assign cores to an app, I might go with the 8 core but that's about the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. Even running DW, Photoshop and Flash simultaneously I don't think you'd need those extra 4 cores very often. Photoshop simultaneous with Final Cut should be OK too. Not sure about Motion but I don't think you can assign RAM and Cores to it the way you can with AE (been a while since i used it).

As for what you're using now... the Nehalem 2.93 GHz machine, given enough RAM and the Radeon GPU, will blow the doors off your G5. Even the prior generation of Mac Pro (3.2 quad) would do that pretty well. So you'll definitely be in happy-town once your new Mac Pro arrives. :)
That sums it up. Lets put it this way, the first generation Intel Macs (2Ghz+ models) were as fast as your G5, so the new models blow it out of the water.

Dorian Gray
2009-03-07, 15:49
Diglloyd has posted his thoughts about the new Mac Pros here (http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/2009-03-blog.html#_20090303MacPro) and here (http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/2009-03-blog.html#_20090304MacProMemory). It's best to take people who are as opinionated as Lloyd with a grain of salt, but read it and make up your own mind.

At present I think I'd side with Moogs on the core-count versus clock-speed issue. Over the next few years we'll see more and more applications adopt efficient multi-threading. For now, Diglloyd has some data (http://macperformanceguide.com/Optimizing-Grades.html) to help you decide. He says bad things about Dreamweaver and Photoshop with regard to using multiple cores effectively.

Lloyd also has a fairly comprehensive high performance guide for Macs here (http://macperformanceguide.com/) that you might wish to browse around to help you get a feel for what improves performance and what doesn't. It's aimed mostly at photographers. If there's one point he drives home it's that more memory almost always improves performance, regardless of how much you have. If the quad-core Mac Pro is limited to 8 GB (and maybe 6 GB at full speed) that should be carefully considered. Keep in mind though that he's working with astronomically large files: sizes that most of us will never see.

nikstar101
2009-03-07, 16:14
Hmmm all this core discussion has put my Mac Pro buying plans in doubt. I was going with the Quad 2.93Ghz over the 2.26 8 core. Mainly because i most of the programmes i run aren't multi-threaded therefore i am going for raw clock speed. The concern i have is the 8 Gb RAM limit, but since i am getting by (although a tad slowly) with an iMac with 2Gb RAM in, i am not sure i will be needing the full 8Gb anyway.

I think the benchmarks will be very interesting and i reckon for standard day-to-day tasks, iLife, Web, iTunes etc the Quad 2.93 will win every time but only where the pro apps kick in will the 2.26 come back and i am not sure by how much??? I mean OK snow Leopard maybe better at managing threads etc but it is still down the application designers to make it work (right??), therefore if your programme is not using 8 cores now it is unlikely to use them when Snow Leopard comes out.

And i would throw in the ATI card too, unless you are going for more than one graphics card.

PB PM
2009-03-07, 16:18
Its going to be a while before programs use all those threads. Even a Quad has eight threads, so you'll still have a lot of power in hand. If you are getting by with 2GBs, I think 6-8GB will be plenty. I have 3GB and find it enough for most tasks, but not Aperture. When I use Aperture I wish I had 8GBs and a little more CPU power wouldn't hurt either! I think it depends on what you are doing. If you are doing a lot of video/audio encoding, more cores is the way to go in the long run.

nikstar101
2009-03-07, 16:28
Yeah Aperture is where everything starts to choke at the moment. And thats the bit that starts to worry me. Yes i can get away with 3Gb now, but when Aperture 3 comes out how about then?? But then again i know peeps who use Aperture on 24" iMacs so at least i ma ahead of them there :lol:

But as you said the with that Hyper-threading the Quad has 8 virtual cores, so that will be interesting to see it against the old real 8 core Mac Pros.

I think you have help confirm that the Quad is the way to go, since i don't really to any video or audio editing (apart from messing around with iMovie..)

canyon_Carver
2009-03-08, 11:21
Well if you are going for FCP...8 core is the way to go. You have to remember to set up your Qmaster service as 8 or 4 individual "clients". This will allow compressor to render the work a lot faster coming out of FCP. If you render now without setting up Qmaster with separated cpu clients then only one or two CPUs will do the work and the rest will be pretty much inactive. Qmaster separated clients will kick on 4 separate render engines, or 8 depending on how you set it up.

For the most part, the "workflow" you won't see any difference. The video card, Ram and HD speed are your greatest additions while you are working in the programs you mentioned, the difference between the machine is when you click the RENDER button. Once those 8 cores click on and chew through final numbers is when you will see the dramatic calculation differences....same holds true for Maya/Cinema. Most computers will work fine setting up the scene, but the render times can change between 10 seconds and 10 minutes depending on the CPUs.

8 core, don't look back.

And agreed - the Nehalem architecture supports up to 8 core chips with 16 core planned. So in 3 years you will see QUAD 8-Core at higher CPU speeds and up to 16TB of Ram with Snow Leopard.

Moogs
2009-03-08, 12:51
I didn't notice the single cpu machine has only 4 RAM slots. That's kind of fucked up if you want my opinion, though it's still true that most people will never need more than 8GB of RAM until system and app requirements take a big jump from where they are now. As for turbo boost, both configurations have this technology (it's built into the processor AFAICT, not the Mac), so not really a concern.

Also the QMaster point holds water if you're doing a lot of FCP rendering. While I stand by my comments about general performance, investment-wise the 8 core machine does seem like a smarter buy in some respects now that I think about it some more.

Dave
2009-03-08, 12:55
I didn't notice the single cpu machine has only 4 RAM slots. That's kind of fucked up if you want my opinion.

It's because the RAM is now attached directly to the CPUs. 1/2 the CPUs, 1/2 the RAM slots.

PB PM
2009-03-08, 15:52
I don't buy that, the memory controller can easily handle more than 8GBs of RAM. C2D desktop CPUs can handle more than that. Sadly I cannot find any information on the CPUs memory controllers memory limits. I personally believe this is an artificial limit, until I see proof otherwise (from Intel itself).

AndyX
2009-03-08, 16:26
Thanks for the info everyone. It's really appreciated.

I think the general consensus is to go for the 8 cores. The extra memory is a big plus and also the fact that snow leopard and other software will utilize all 8 cores. I think I'll get it with 8Gb memory from apple (4 x 2gb) and then see how it goes. I know Apple memory is expensive, but if I get the standard 6gb (6 x 1gb) I've been told I may have to replace it if I need more memory rather than add to it (because of space - is this correct?).

I've also been advised to go for the ATI card and I want to get a second internal hard disk and would prefer to get a disk separately (750 - 1tb) - do you have any recommendations?

Thanks for all your help!

nikstar101
2009-03-09, 02:25
Mate congratulations on the choice of machine. I am still over-thnking the decision :lol:

But one things I have rattling around my head is that I reckon the benchmarks will show that the Quad 2.93 will out pace the Octo 2.26 in all by a few tasks. And those will be seriously heavy video and graphics (and I don't mean the usual photoshop as it doesn't really ale advanage of the extra cores). And obviously programmes that require more than 8gb of ram.

And this is the reason why Apple has introduced the 8gb limit to ensure people buy the most expensive machine.

Just a theory for now but no doubt I will be proved wrong by then end of today.

PB PM
2009-03-09, 02:34
In some apps maybe, but I doubt it will do better in video encoding. The 8 Core, even a slower one will win the day in that area. This has been proven true with dual core vs. quad core C2D based systems, so I doubt it will be different this time around. If I had the choice, I would go 8 Core, not just for RAM reasons. First of all, the speed difference is 670Mhz, its a gap, but then you have double the cores to do the work. The math is easy if you think about it.

nikstar101
2009-03-10, 14:52
Well after seeing the initial results (i think more results are needed at the moment) the Octo 2.26 is looking a bit odd. As in Cinebench it is beaten by the Octo 2.8 although i does win in Geekbench.

The results are all looking very strange at the moment. I did nearly decide to go with the Octo 2.26 but i think i might wait till the Quad results come out.

PB PM
2009-03-10, 16:27
If Aperture is your main choke point, keep mind that RAM will be the thing that makes the most difference. The difference in outputting a RAW image to a JPEG is not that long, maybe 10-20 seconds for a 10MP RAW image converted to a 1650x1050 jpeg on my 2.16Ghz (C2D) MBP, so I don't think CPU headroom is a big deal. What will speed things up is more RAM and faster hard drives, you can bet that will be even more important as people move up to full frame cameras with massive MP counts as the D3X, or 5D Mark II.

nikstar101
2009-03-11, 01:47
Just got a Quad 2.66 Cinebench score.

Rendering (Single CPU): 3572 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 14753 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 4.13
Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 6028 CB-GFX

If this is correct it shows that the Quad 2.93 will give the Octo 2.26 a good run for its money. If you use the same Multi speed up value you would get 16825 for the Multi render on the 2.93Ghz. This gives you 93% of the performance of the Octo 2.26 in multi-threading while trashing it in single thread rendering (1.76x).

It now makes sense why Apple added the 8Gb RAM limit. If they didn't people would buy these over the bottom range Octo.

I will link the other results a bit later, got to head off to work now!!! :(

PB PM
2009-03-11, 01:52
You do have to realize none of the benchmarks are optimized for 8 cores...

nikstar101
2009-03-11, 04:56
Really?? I would have thought cinebench would use all the cores?

PB PM
2009-03-11, 11:07
Using all the cores, and being optimized are two different things.

nikstar101
2009-03-11, 13:28
PB i quite agree that Cinebench may not be full optimised to run with 8 cores but if anything i think that this gives it a more "real life" affect.

As i am sure that there are a lot of programmes out there optimised for dual core operating and can use of multiple cores. But i bet there are a lot less that are optimised for 8 cores. Therefore Cinebench will give you an idea of what the majority of programmes will act like on your computer. Yes there are some programmes that are super optimised and this is reflected in the higher Geekbench scores that the new machines are getting.

But i don't think that we will suddenly see every programme out there being optimised for 8 cores therefore Cinebench is a fair reflection of the typical speed you will see out of the machine on a variety of tasks (ie not just the one specific app). If you do use one app that is optimised then yes by all means look at a hgihly optimised result, but if like me for example your Mac Pro has to do a wide variety of things then the Cinebench result is probably closer to the mark.

Gargoyle
2009-03-11, 16:47
You do all realise that your Mac can run more than one program at a time don't you? ;)

Activity monitor is telling me that I currently have 417 threads and 77 processes, so surly more cores will help anyway even if individual programs are not optimised.

nikstar101
2009-04-03, 05:46
Well just to conclude this thread (well for me anyway :D ), i splashed out and bought a Quad Core 2.93 Mac Pro with 6 Gb RAM and an ATI 4870.

Its a great machine, i mean i really didn't need an eight core machine as i don't do video work and to be perfectly honest i just mess about with photos (its not something i do are a living). I could have probably gotten away with a top of the range iMac but since i have 3 hard drives the Mac Pro was on the cards, plus i like ability ot change the screen or graphics card when ever i want.

There is one problem though. I bought it with the new Apple LED Cinema Display, which has clearly been designed as a laptop screen not a desktop screen. As the cable running to the displayport from the monitor is way way too short! The Mac Pro basically has to be sat directly under the desk below. Which is really annoying!! I don't think that there is a cable extension for a mini display-port??

Other than that i am overall very impressed. Doing my routine things the CPU is never maxed out which shocked me! Although i do have a niggling feeling that the case is as well put to together as my old PowerMac G5.... I mean everything is beautifully laid out and well thought of, but the overall quality doesn't feel as good.... Maybe i am just an old PPC user at heart :lol:

scratt
2009-04-03, 06:27
Nice machine. I find 2.93 is a much nicer number than 2.6, don't you?!!. :)

Interesting you say that about build quality.. For my Core Duo 17" MBP I feel like that. When I put it next to my significantly older PB G4 17" the G4 still looks better and it's a bit long in the tooth now. Specifically the backlight on the MBP is terribly patchy, and the whole LCD panel surround with the catches and square hole for the iSight just looks unfinished.

But my Unibody 17" is all good. Makes them both look scruffy! :)

Luca
2009-04-03, 10:38
There is one problem though. I bought it with the new Apple LED Cinema Display, which has clearly been designed as a laptop screen not a desktop screen. As the cable running to the displayport from the monitor is way way too short! The Mac Pro basically has to be sat directly under the desk below. Which is really annoying!! I don't think that there is a cable extension for a mini display-port??

Wow. Industrial design fail.

I found a discussion on Apple's discussion boards and here's what I've learned:

- The cable is 42" long.
- The cable is permanently attached to the display and is the only input for the display.
- There are no female-to-male mini-DP extension cables available anywhere.
- There are female-to-female DisplayPort cables available, but those are not mini-DP.
- The official position on this is "this display is aimed toward the notebook market; most people who buy Mac Pros get the 30" display with it."

Apple must be the only company that still uses permanently attached cables with no alternate inputs on their displays. What a load of BS. Just another reason to never buy an Apple display (you can get an LED-backlit NEC display for about the same price but it'll actually work on more than a select few Apple notebooks).

zippy
2009-04-03, 11:51
I have to agree that this was a bit bone-headed of Apple.

If they would just make the cable a removable, replaceable unit, it would solve the problem IMO. That way they could have different 'all in one' cables depending on the buyers needs. I'd even package them separately so that at purchase, you get to choose which cable you need - just make sure that buyers have to choose a cable. That way you can avoid people accidentally buying just the monitor and getting pissed when they open it and find no cables.

Luca
2009-04-03, 12:01
Every single other LCD I've ever seen (ever!) has had at least a removable cable. Some CRTs, especially later or cheaper models, did have attached cables, but LCDs almost always have removable cables and the vast majority (though not all) have multiple inputs.

This is just another example of Apple designing a nice product and then screwing it in some obscure way for absolutely no reason. They seem to revel in seeing how much they can frustrate their customers without actually turning them away.

Eugene
2009-04-03, 12:53
One thing to note about the new Xeons and 'turbo' mode. The X5570 2.93GHz Xeon is capable of bumping up to 3.33GHz with 2 cores and 3.2GHz with all 4 cores enabled.

The 2.26GHz L5520 is only capable of 2.4GHz during 2 core operation and 2.33GHz with 4 cores active.

nikstar101
2009-04-04, 09:02
I am hoping that the turbo increase in speed also applies for 4 core model as it is a different processor than the x5570 (x35xx??).

Well i went to Apple's feedback page, to tell them about me short display lead issue, but i think it is going to be too much to hope for some sort of fix.

Yeah i do love the 2.93 Quad core model. I think, for me, it is a much better buy than the Octo 2.26 model. As i think i will actually use all the of the speed rather than all of the cores. But it is a great machine, even syncing with my iPhone seems hugely faster. I was initially worried that this machine won't last 4-5 years but seeing the processor usage barely peak over 30% i think it will be fine!! :lol:

And the Apple LED Display is much better than i thought it would be. The Apple Stores don't do it justice, maybe its the store lighting. It is far superior to the 20 inch iMac (different panel) but the LED backlight makes you realise how long a normal backlight takes to warm up. And the colours do look vibrant without being too bright.

I would recommend the Quad 2.93 and LED display combo (although only Mac Pro and display are close together).

Moogs
2009-04-04, 10:05
Glad you're enjoying your new rig, nik. Have you rocked any of those Geekbench things or similar? Curious to see how much faster it is than a 4-core 2.8GHz Penryn box.

nikstar101
2009-04-04, 16:15
Moogs, just did some benchmarking

Cinebench R10:
Open GL: 6751
Single CPU Render: 3903
Multi CPU Render: 15886

Geekbench 32-Bit:
9148

How does that compare to your Quad 2.8?

Moogs
2009-04-04, 21:35
Geekbench 32-bit (which is the only one that really matters for now):

~5548

Which, I guess you could roughly extrapolate to mean your machine is about 30-40% faster on average, though possibly less than that for common tasks like iTunes ripping, Photoshop etc. Not bad though considering the clock speed is only 193MHz faster... the architectural improvements clearly make a difference. The scary thing is that 2.66 8 core beast is over 14,000, though I don't think you can logically take that to mean it's 3x faster than last year's generation. I think the general rule of thumb is if you can double the Geekbench score, you're basically 50% faster overall, and so on.

Luca
2009-04-05, 01:46
Geekbench 32-bit (which is the only one that really matters for now):

~5548

Which, I guess you could roughly extrapolate to mean your machine is about 30-40% faster on average, though possibly less than that for common tasks like iTunes ripping, Photoshop etc. Not bad though considering the clock speed is only 193MHz faster... the architectural improvements clearly make a difference. The scary thing is that 2.66 8 core beast is over 14,000, though I don't think you can logically take that to mean it's 3x faster than last year's generation. I think the general rule of thumb is if you can double the Geekbench score, you're basically 50% faster overall, and so on.

I think it pretty much depends wholly on how multi-threaded the benchmark or application is. Of course, the Nehalem-based Xeons not only have a lot of architectural improvements over the Core-based ones, but they also run two threads per core. So a new quad-core Mac Pro should should a very large improvement for highly multi-threaded things like video encoding. On the other hand, for things that tend to run on only one or maybe two threads, like games, they don't show a big improvement.

nikstar101
2009-04-05, 07:06
See i find that Geekbench is probably the worse at benchmarking real life situations. Mainly because i think (and i have no real background in this field so i will try to tread lightly), that it shows ultimate top speed, what the Mac or PC can do if everything is perfect. But in the real world it is never like that. Cinebench i find a bit better. I mean Geekbench is good, like comparing a cars max speed, as it provides a clear higher or lower score, but how often can you get in situations where you can use it??

I mean look at the 8 core versus 4 core results from Barefeats.com, the 8 core doubled the 4 core score in Geekbench but under real life situations (minus memory score as that is of little use), it really isn't anywhere near that quick. I mean yes there are a load more programmes out there have the ones tested but still it doesn't make me think yes that would be a good additional £2000 to be spent. Especially since that is comparing the Quad and Octo 2.93, what would the Quad 2.93 versus the Octo 2.66 look like.

http://barefeats.com/nehal08.html

As in multi-threading, MacOS Activity Monitor sees 8 cores in CPU History and all of them are in use when doing everyday tasks, such as running the face recognition system on iPhoto 09.

scratt
2009-04-05, 08:05
Well Geekbench is exactly that. It's like putting your Porsche on a Dyno.
You are unlikely to use it to it's full potential on the public roads, nor be able to get the best out of it unless you have more driving skills than the average driver.

But it is still valid at what it does.

As others have said most apps don't multi-thread as well as they could, and most games are even worse.

So at the end of the day for your average user a better test is to simply run the apps you will be using day to day on a machine and see how it performs.

Luca
2009-04-05, 11:30
See i find that Geekbench is probably the worse at benchmarking real life situations. Mainly because i think (and i have no real background in this field so i will try to tread lightly), that it shows ultimate top speed, what the Mac or PC can do if everything is perfect. But in the real world it is never like that. Cinebench i find a bit better. I mean Geekbench is good, like comparing a cars max speed, as it provides a clear higher or lower score, but how often can you get in situations where you can use it??

I mean look at the 8 core versus 4 core results from Barefeats.com, the 8 core doubled the 4 core score in Geekbench but under real life situations (minus memory score as that is of little use), it really isn't anywhere near that quick. I mean yes there are a load more programmes out there have the ones tested but still it doesn't make me think yes that would be a good additional £2000 to be spent. Especially since that is comparing the Quad and Octo 2.93, what would the Quad 2.93 versus the Octo 2.66 look like.

http://barefeats.com/nehal08.html

As in multi-threading, MacOS Activity Monitor sees 8 cores in CPU History and all of them are in use when doing everyday tasks, such as running the face recognition system on iPhoto 09.

But you can't only look at Cinebench either. You really have to look at a wide range of benchmarks because certain ones favor certain CPU features. I was looking at some benchmarks recently for most of the current mid- to high-end consumer desktop processors and there was a huge disparity among all the benchmarks. Unfortunately it was on AnandTech which appears to be down at the moment, but from what I remember, Sysmark (which is supposed to measure overall computer performance in normal use) is heavily biased in favor of Intel CPUs, while encoding with x264 does much better with AMD's processors (and also loves extra cores). They had Cinebench tests up as well but I don't remember the results and I can't check them now.

EDIT: Site is back up. Cinebench R10 looks pretty balanced, but you still want to look at multiple benchmarks.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3512&p=6

turtle
2009-05-10, 23:36
So I'm looking to get myself a Mac Pro finally but still planning and setting the budget on it. Here's what I do: Lots of video encoding. MPEG Streamclip, Handbreak, iMovie are almost always running. Occasionally RipIt or Parallels with DVDFab Platinum instead. Toast is also almost always running along with iTunes streaming to my AppleTV, though not as much since putting the 250GB HDD in it.

I also do a fair amount of audio editing as well. Ripping in iTunes to Apple Lossless, mixing in GarageBand, and publishing to podcast. This isn't too taxing though. It's the video stuff that is taking forever.

So in my really tired state (late night preps to make today special for my wife) I tried to get the most out of this thread and it seems like it can go either way. I'm hoping with a better idea of the work I'm actually doing I can get a more definitive answer on which one I should lean toward: Single faster CPU or two slower CPUs. I'm not worried about RAM because I'll eventually max it out anyway. :D

Eugene
2009-05-11, 01:06
Stuff like Handbrake that uses the x264 encoder doesn't scale as well as you might think. I doubt you'd see appreciable gains in encode time going from 4 cores to 8 unless you batch two encodes at the same time.

Jason
2009-05-11, 03:51
I'm also saving hard for a Mac Pro. Going to be a couple of months yet. There is a very good review of the new Mac Pro and the whole issue of apps which use multi core and those that don't at Ars.

http://xrl.us/ber8vt

Regards