Liza

Hi guys,

The company I work for needs to invest in a new pc. The main use will be for 3ds max 8/9 with Vray 1.5, Photoshop CS2, and occassionally Adobe Premier.

The IT guy would like to know which is the best - two dual cores or a quad core? They would like a minimum of 4 bucket rendering (if that makes a difference).

Also, I believe the quad cores are more money - is it worth the extra?

The actual quad core he's looking at is - Quad-Core Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz 1066FSB 8MB L2 Cache [-67]

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Many thanks, Liza

STRAT

this thread might also help -

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/20683-quads.html

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AJLynn

There isn't much difference in performance - if one ends up being a lot more than the other, go with the less expensive option. I'd expect the dual-dual to cost more because it would use Xeons and those are more of a specialty item, with more expensive motherboards and RAM. The real difference is between "Netburst" and "Core" CPUs - Netburst CPUs, which include all Pentium 4, Pentium D and Xeons numbered below 5100, are much slower and less power efficient than Cores, which includes everything with "Core Duo" or "Core 2" in the name and newer Xeons. For example, in many cases a Core 2 is twice as fast as a Pentium D with the same clock speed (the value in GHz).

designmule

If I were spec'ing a workstation I would probably go with dual cores. Generally, they run at a higher clock speed than quad cores. Max does not really take advantage of all those cores when navigating around in the viewport but it will take advantage of the higher clock speed.

Now for rendering I would go with the quad core. Because rendering is a long process that maxes out the processors for an extended time, four slower cores will ultimately outrun two faster ones (assuming that the dual cores don't have a clock speed that is double that of the quad cores).

I really haven't seen any benchmarks on quad core processors running Photoshop or Premiere but unless you run filters or processes that max out the processors for an extended period of time I would suspect that the higher clock speed dual core would be better.

What ever you get, I hope you like it.

AJLynn

I dunno, the 2.4GHz Core2 is already pretty darn fast and the most you can get now is 3.0GHz. Total of 9.6GHz vs. 6.0. I think the benefit to multithreaded operations would more than make up for the 25% increase in single-threaded speed.

designmule

You're correct that the quad core has all the potential to be faster, significantly faster, so long as you can light up all those cores for any length of time. But if your processor usage favors short blips or non-smp aware applications and / or functions you might be better of buying clock speed over cores.

Below is a link to a series of benchmarks discussing this point.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2897&p=9

If I wanted the machine to render, and I had the money, I'd buy a quad core no doubt about it.