Hi Guys,
Sitting here on the fence and contemplating building a new workstation for my Photoshop work (everything for Digital Photography), and I look at the various offerings.
I am thinking of building a Windows based machine again, looked at the Macpro (work on a Macpro too) but I feel I have better expansions options on a PC/Windows machine.
So, I have been looking at CPU's both from AMD and INTEL, i also have one of each of these in the stable already, but they are both getting a bit long in the tooth.
Now I am thinking either Xeon or Opteron, Dual processor, mainly because I can fit a whole lot more ram into these, and I think the sweet spot is the 4Gb sticks, the 8Gb sticks are too expensive atm, but most workstation boards will support both 4 and 8GB sticks, so there is room for expansion later.
I am looking for a box with about 3-5 years life-span, with various upgrades in-between, such as more memory and faster CPU's as they come down in price. The problem is if they do not continue the CPU-socket, but such is life.
So, in today's market you can get AMD Magny-Cours with 8 or 12 cores but lower Ghz or INTEL XEON Westmere with 4 or 6 cores, but higher Ghz, (yes, there is an 8-core Xeon but at USD$4k ouch) so which way to turn, INTEL has been very successful in the past 4 years.
So everything else being equal, is more cores better then higher CPU frequency? both of these platforms now uses the same memory, they can both have upto 256GB of ram if one could find and afford 16Gb sticks :-) i Am thinking 64-72GB depending on the board chosen.
Now, I know the CPU isn't the only thing that makes a difference here, GPU, #of ram, but most importantly is the hard drive speed, but more on this later
thanks for taking your time
Henrik