Workstation: Core 2 Duo or Dual Core Xeon?
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Our graphic designers are getting new PC's and I'm (.NET developer primarily) getting lumped in (finally). These machines will all be Dell PC's. A couple questions for those that know and are willing to spare a moment: 1) If I go with about a 2.66 Ghz processor in either case, which machine is better for our needs (Core 2 Duo vs. Dual Core Xeon)? Keeping my development out of the picture for a moment, our developers have to do a great deal of rendering. They use Photoshop of course, but also Adobe Flash, After Effects, DreamWeaver, and various other tools. They are usually rendering MPG2 but till be moving mostly to High Def... at this point I'm assuming MPG4. Is there an appreciable difference? The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit cheaper. 2) Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers? Thanks all, Matt Philmon
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Our graphic designers are getting new PC's and I'm (.NET developer primarily) getting lumped in (finally). These machines will all be Dell PC's. A couple questions for those that know and are willing to spare a moment: 1) If I go with about a 2.66 Ghz processor in either case, which machine is better for our needs (Core 2 Duo vs. Dual Core Xeon)? Keeping my development out of the picture for a moment, our developers have to do a great deal of rendering. They use Photoshop of course, but also Adobe Flash, After Effects, DreamWeaver, and various other tools. They are usually rendering MPG2 but till be moving mostly to High Def... at this point I'm assuming MPG4. Is there an appreciable difference? The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit cheaper. 2) Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers? Thanks all, Matt Philmon
Stick to XP - Vista won't be good enough for commercial use for a year at least. We have Precision 390s at work, good, reliable and quiet.
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Our graphic designers are getting new PC's and I'm (.NET developer primarily) getting lumped in (finally). These machines will all be Dell PC's. A couple questions for those that know and are willing to spare a moment: 1) If I go with about a 2.66 Ghz processor in either case, which machine is better for our needs (Core 2 Duo vs. Dual Core Xeon)? Keeping my development out of the picture for a moment, our developers have to do a great deal of rendering. They use Photoshop of course, but also Adobe Flash, After Effects, DreamWeaver, and various other tools. They are usually rendering MPG2 but till be moving mostly to High Def... at this point I'm assuming MPG4. Is there an appreciable difference? The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit cheaper. 2) Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers? Thanks all, Matt Philmon
Matt Philmon wrote:
I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers?
The DRM issues, if you are referring to high definition protected content, won't affect you at all unless you are consuming protected content. Chances are that if you are having to ask that question then you won't be so it won't be an issue, but you would want to check with your designers. Even if you do use protected content, only that content will be affectd by the DRM restrictions, anything else done simultaneously will be unaffected. Vista is fine for developing on (I've not hit any problems setting up a new developer PC with the current batch of dev tools and SDKs since last months release), but for things like After Effects and so on you would want to trial it out first to check compatability. Even then it obviously depends on whether your hardware manufacturers have supporting drivers out there (if you buy from Dell et al than that is unlikely to be a problem). I can't comment on the processers, nowadays everything seems to perform much the same at that level for me. RAM is the bottleneck in most higher-spec machines I've seen or used.
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Our graphic designers are getting new PC's and I'm (.NET developer primarily) getting lumped in (finally). These machines will all be Dell PC's. A couple questions for those that know and are willing to spare a moment: 1) If I go with about a 2.66 Ghz processor in either case, which machine is better for our needs (Core 2 Duo vs. Dual Core Xeon)? Keeping my development out of the picture for a moment, our developers have to do a great deal of rendering. They use Photoshop of course, but also Adobe Flash, After Effects, DreamWeaver, and various other tools. They are usually rendering MPG2 but till be moving mostly to High Def... at this point I'm assuming MPG4. Is there an appreciable difference? The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit cheaper. 2) Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers? Thanks all, Matt Philmon
Matt Philmon wrote:
- Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers?
The question of Vista really should not be started with the question of Vista. The question should be market intent. A) are your designers' software available/tested under Vista? (may elliminate choice) B) do you need them to be skilled in Vista use to achieve a goal? C) How do your designers feel about the choice? D) How much company profits are put on the line in having problems with Vista? If you are leading a market and need to test, work with/in, or otherwise get some stability of a product (or products) under Vista, I say go for it. If you are getting Vista because of the cool name and logo, don't. If you are considering Vista because your designers want to, maybe. If you are considering Vista when your designers are crying in the background at the thought, don't. If you are putting significant company profits on the line for Vista, don't!! Vista is new. Regardless of any opinion, because it is new it carries risk. "Some" of that risk will be removed by waiting. Those who take the risk because they need to get to the Vista market faster, will find the bugs, and hopefully they will be fixed. This is the common reference to "wait until Service Pack 1". This is actually a reasonable idea for anyone who cannot take risk, or has a choice to push off Vista marketting of their product until later. (start late, finish late, so some of us have to start early). Things that are unique about your shop will only get delayed, now or later the bugs will show up. So even delaying sometimes just delays bug detection, and increases hatred of anything new. (thus the comments, "someone should have found this, this is ...." never reported, never found, never fixed, still there) Most XP systems ship with upgrade certificates, free upgrade to Vista later. This removes risk but keeps choice.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Stick to XP - Vista won't be good enough for commercial use for a year at least. We have Precision 390s at work, good, reliable and quiet.
Trollslayer wrote:
We have Precision 390s at work, good, reliable and quiet
That's nice to hear. I just bought four of the wee beasties at work, one each for myself and three of my coworkers. They came in yesterday, and the IT guys were supposed to have blessed them (actually, damned them by installing Lotus Notes) by today. Unfortunately, I'm working at home today and probably tomorrow due to the weather :sigh:. I hate driving in snow/ice/sleet.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Our graphic designers are getting new PC's and I'm (.NET developer primarily) getting lumped in (finally). These machines will all be Dell PC's. A couple questions for those that know and are willing to spare a moment: 1) If I go with about a 2.66 Ghz processor in either case, which machine is better for our needs (Core 2 Duo vs. Dual Core Xeon)? Keeping my development out of the picture for a moment, our developers have to do a great deal of rendering. They use Photoshop of course, but also Adobe Flash, After Effects, DreamWeaver, and various other tools. They are usually rendering MPG2 but till be moving mostly to High Def... at this point I'm assuming MPG4. Is there an appreciable difference? The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit cheaper. 2) Among those tools listed, I've heard some stories of problems with Vista. Vista is new, of course, and I'd generally want to hold off but should I? The PC's generally ship with Vista though some of the ones can be shipped with either Vista or XP. I'd kind of like to have Vista but I've heard of there being some DRM issues that "might" cause problems for our Creative Designers? Thanks all, Matt Philmon
If the Xeon is from the 51xx family, it's basically the same as the Core 2 Duo but with more cache (4MB versus 2MB). A greater amount of cache can help with reasonably well-organised code, so you should see a small performance gain on data sets larger than 2MB but smaller than 4MB (code that was built with no real consideration for caching will probably have to hit main memory all the time regardless of having more cache memory on the processor). IIRC Xeons with no model numbers, just a clock speed, and those with a model number below 5100 are still based on the 'Netburst' core (similar to Pentium 4/Pentium D). These are much slower clock-for-clock than a Core 2 Duo. To complicate things, there's also a Xeon 3000 series which claim to be Core-based, but I can't really see what differentiates them from the 5100s.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder