[dkrz123]

I just bought a new 2.4GHz 8 core Mac Pro to replace my 2006 2.66 Quad that just died...

I bought it in a bit of a rush because I was working on a project with a tight deadline with Pro Tools. I just swapped in my old startup disk and media drives and was able to continue working without a hitch.

After doing a bit of research, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I would've been better off getting the single processor 3.33GHz 6 core machine. Professionally, I work mostly in audio and a bit of video.

After comparing prices, the 6 core equipped with the ATI 5870 card turns out to be only $100 dollars more. That is because my wife works for Apple and we would get a 25% discount on the sale.
Then I would just get 8 gigs of RAM from OWC or somewhere and would be good to go...

In the end, I guess what I'm asking is how much real world performance difference is there between those two models? Should I just hang on to my 8 core 2.4 or should I return it? What would you do?

Clock speed vs multi core seems to be a bit of a debate from the research I've done so far.

Thanks for any input!

[Spheric Harlot]

The more multi-processing you need, the bigger the 8-core advantage over the 6-core.

A friend decided on an octa for his studio, but he's on Logic and Nuendo, with lots of plug-ins and high track counts. The eight-core is definitely the better option, there, as those applications are heavily optimized for parallelization.


Edit: Wait, I'm confused. There is no "new" 2.24 GHz octacore machine. Watcha got, dkrz?

[residentEvil]

might be a typo? 2.4Ghz is all i see...

[dkrz123]

Originally Posted by residentEvil 

might be a typo? 2.4Ghz is all i see...

Fixed - thanks!