Duo Core Vs. Quad Core...

[jinsley]

Buying a new computer for the office and I was wondering if anyone could give me any feedback concerning the peformance of the new quad-cores coming out?

 

I'm just wondering if they directly affect render times and how or if the office should just invest in a good graphics card like the NVidia quadro fx series???

 

...Edit...

Just saw this same question answered in another thread... my bad!

[AJLynn]

More cores give you faster renders, and the speed of the video card in combination with the speed of one core give editor window performance. Most renderers these days are very efficient at running multiple cores, so a quad is almost twice as fast at rendering as a duo of the same speed. Certainly a better investment for most people here than a Quadro.

 

So you've got something to compare to - I just ran Cinebench R10 on my new Core2 Quad Q6600 box. It's got an Asus P5K, 4GB of Corsair DDR2-800 memory at 4-4-4-12 and an XFX 8800GTS card. Overclocked to 3GHz. OpenGL score was 6311 and multithreaded rendering score was 10791. The surprising bit was how much the RAM timings didn't affect the score - I ran it at motherboard defaults (5-5-5-18) before dropping the timings to Corsair's ratings, and with the slower timings the scores were 6294 and 10643.

[thinice]

Simple answer. Quad Core is better.

 

If your software is properly multithreaded, even a basic Q6600 will run rings around the fastest Dual Core available.

[anvaraziz]

core 2duo e6600 with 2gb ram - 4m 40 sec

 

core 2 quad q6600 with 2gb ram - 2m 10 sec

(over clocked to 3.2ghz - 1min 35 sec)

 

xeon 5130 X 2 with 4 gb ram - 2m 25 sec

 

from my own experience using this benchmark file - http://www.vrayelite.com/benchmark.zip