upgrade to 8 core mac

[mesht]

just 4 mths back, i purchased the newly released dual core xeon mac pro, and my office recently just bought a dual quad core xeon pc for the 3d team!!

now, my office pc is twice as fast as my mac!

 

so i have spent almost $8000 on the mac, but i loved the overall performace! it's very fast and with xp pro x64 running, running multiple programs is almost smooth.

 

i was contemplating whether to consider upgrading to the new 8-core technology, but maintaning my current hardware settings. i believe to upgrade to a new processor requires re-installing of the OSX and windows, and since my budget almost drain me dry, should i wait a little longer before Vista is stable as xp x64 pro, also the improved drivers?

[AJLynn]

Well, your Mac is already pretty darn fast - is there some reason you need the extra cores, when you already have them at the office?

 

I've read that you can upgrade the dual-dual to dual-quad by swapping out the CPUs, but I bet that voids the warranty. Doing this usually doesn't require OS reinstalls.

 

XP64 is the correct choice for most uses. (Did you need to do anything special to get it to run?) Forget Vista - just don't think about it until it's got at least SP2. So far it doesn't do anything useful that XP doesn't, can't do some things that XP can, and has more system resources overhead so it eats more of your RAM and CPU while accomplishing less.

[mesht]

well, main reason is synchronzation. anyway, only one pc is quad enabled, the rest are the previous generation of dual processors and dual cores.

 

actually, when i read the instruction to run xp pro under bootcamp, it only states to use XP Pro 32bit. they put a warning not to use the x64 bit version but i was curious, slid the disc in, (it's only an evaluation copy) so let it run like a normal installation, and hey, it just install smoothly just like xp pro 32bit. only drawback is that one of my device drivers is not supported under 64, but i notice it did not affect overall performance nor that 'device' error msg has affect any programs.

 

yea, i read Vista consumed a lot of systems resources, maybe good to wait till SP2.

[visual3d]

If youre into animation or huge project that requires a lot of rendering....i suggest you get the quad or build from scratch. Much cheaper. Just imagine your rendering time cut in half...that's exactly what it does...i change from quad 3.0 to 8 core 2.66 and am verry happy about it.