Thank you Jack.
I was just wondering if it was worth to upgrade the processors from 2.66 2 cores to 2.66 4 cores.
It would be a couple of hours of work and 8/900$ for a pair of new processors.
Here is a little bit of data to ponder. Some friends and I just did the following comparisons on our three different Mac Pros. We processed out 10 P45+ files to full 16-bit tiffs and timed the total process. All of us are running C1 4.6.2 and read and write our files from/to RAID-0 drive arrays. Note this is *NOT* a scientific test though, as we used 10 random files on our systems and only processed to similar, not identical output settings, But at least it should give a relative idea of performance differences:
Box 1, Quad-core 2.66 with 12G 667 RAM: 2:13
Box 2, Quad-core 3.0 with 24G 667 RAM: 1:58
Box 3, 8-core 3.2 with 16G 800 RAM: 1:17
So we can see that cores and actual processor speed seem to matter and perhaps RAM throughput matters more than total RAM. This is where the new machines improve significantly -- at least in theory; 1066MHz DDR3 RAM being theoretically twice as fast I/O as 800MHz DDR2 RAM.
FWIW Note on the above: I can tell you on my box, C! had the cores being utilized at 800% nearly 90% of the time, yet only about 30% or 5G of my RAM was being tagged.
Cheers,