William Sutherland Architect

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	Hardware

I recently bought a dual dual-core Xeon 5150 processor PC built by Armari in London. Nice machine, but even the memory modules (Fully Buffered DIMMs) have heatsinks on them - the copper strips either side of the memory modules at the top of the picture...

There is an interesting article here on the differences in architecture with the dual Xeon 51xx design and memory compared to AMD processors and memory.

The new Intel QX6700 quad core processor is essentially the same thing in terms of rendering results with Cinema 4D (one of the few bits of software to make good use of 4 cores) but at lower cost.
There is a bit more to it than that but for me I like the dual Xeon 5150 - it is certainly a very fast, very stable machine even on single threaded applications - which are the majority.
The consensus seems to be that faster clock rate dual cores are better than slower quad-cores in many computing tasks.


3DFluff have an interesting comparison of Cinebench results for different machine configurations which you can add to I think (Cinebench is the free benchmarking software from Maxon which runs some Cinema 4D based tests on your PC or Mac). It includes dual core Opterons and 64 bit C4D results which look very promising.

3DFluff also have some neat guides on CPUs and graphics cards. It is particularly interesting that in Cinema 4D there seems little point in buying a hugely expensive Quadro card rather than a high-end Geforce as Cinema 4D does not use the special features of the Quadro cards.
I very much doubt if Allplan makes use of them either - in fact Allplan does not use the second processor directly either. It just helps if you are running several programmes at once.

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