Is this upgrade worth it?

Digi

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My current work machine for Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and 3D Max use is getting near 3 years old.

How much better would this setup be over the old one.

New machine:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6700 2.667Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB, 4MB L2 cache
2.0GB (2 x 1.0GB DIMM) 667MHz DDR2 ECC SDRAM Memory
320GB (7,200 rpm) SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
256MB nVidia Quadro FX3450 Graphics Card

Current machine:
2x Intel Xeon (Prestonia) 2.8Ghz w/HT
1.0GB DDR 266Mhz
80GB 7,200rpm ATA133 + 250GB 7,200rpm ATA 133
128MB Quadro FX1000
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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Well considering these are the older Xeons I would say it's a good upgrade but have you thought about looking into the newer Xeons? They kick major @$$ and a decent price. If the price of some of the more loaded woodcrest machines is too much then I'd say just go with the conroe machine.
 

NMDante

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Looks pretty good, but why ECC memory? What motherboard are you planning on using that has to have ECC memory?

Otherwise, it looks good.

The E6600 is a good alternative, as AJ6065 mentioned, too.
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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Smile Your computing speed may double. Maybe more.

Actually it will probably more than double. The Xeon 5160 can almost double two prestonias at 3.6 GHz and an E6600 is just a desktop version of the 5140 which shouldn't be too far off of dual 3.2 GHz
 

Digi

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Looks pretty good, but why ECC memory? What motherboard are you planning on using that has to have ECC memory?

Otherwise, it looks good.

The E6600 is a good alternative, as AJ6065 mentioned, too.

Ah - that would be because it's a Dell (dude?). Don't have much choice there.

I also have to try and keep the price down (as much as possible) and I wasn't sure how much the Xeons had improved. I'm off to revisit the prices now.......about double or more performance. That's interesting guys. Thanks for your help! :)
 

DavidC1

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Actually it will probably more than double. The Xeon 5160 can almost double two prestonias at 3.6 GHz and an E6600 is just a desktop version of the 5140 which shouldn't be too far off of dual 3.2 GHz

Actually E6600 is identically clocked to 5150 and will be faster than 5150 as chipsets to Core 2 are superior in performance to the Xeon chipset despite the fact that Xeon has 25% faster FSB.

Search out Tomshardware tests for Core based Xeon tests and with Quad-channel DDR2-533 memory, it achieves 5.8GB/sec and with Dual channel memory it gets 3.8GB/sec. Core 2 based platforms can achieve 5.4GB/sec on DDR2-667 CL5: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/core_2_memory_tuning/page12.asp

Not to mention faster RAM for lower prices are available for Core 2 compared to Core-based Xeon.

Latencies are also significantly higher. I found searching over google that its around twice higher as the Core 2 systems.

SpecFP is 10% higher on the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme compared to 3GHz Xeon 5160.

It might be Core 2 Duo E6700 performs good as Xeon 5160 clocked at 3GHz.


In response to the first poster.
According to Toms(Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/page13.html), E6700, the same CPU posted on the setup you want to buy compared to Pentium D 840, which is a dual core running at 3.2GHz and is roughly 2x Prestonia at 3.2GHz, performance advantage is summarized below:

3DS Max 8.0: 86% faster
Photoshop CS2(Rendering 5 pictures 66MB, 7 filters): 35%
Photoshop CS2(Converting 5 photos 9MP to 0.8 MP): 66%
Premiere Pro 2.0(Windows Media Encoder 9.1 AP, 24 sec HDTV 1920x1080 MPEG2 to WMV): 52% faster


You can think of Core 2 Duo performing twice as fast as equivalently clocked Pentium D's at same clock speed.

Since Prestonia Xeons use 533MHz FSB, you can expect the advantages to be much greater than above. You can derive whether its worth it or not. It does look quite a lot faster.
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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I stand corrected. Although he'd probably be better off with dual xeons (due to the fact that he's using a lot of content creation software) I still think that the E6700 will beat the crap out of his current setup.
 

DeMonOfElRu

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My current work machine for Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and 3D Max use is getting near 3 years old.

How much better would this setup be over the old one.

New machine:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6700 2.667Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB, 4MB L2 cache
2.0GB (2 x 1.0GB DIMM) 667MHz DDR2 ECC SDRAM Memory
320GB (7,200 rpm) SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
256MB nVidia Quadro FX3450 Graphics Card

Dude , I'm doing much the same things you do. And your upgrade IS worth it. I can vouch for that .. even with the slower version e6600.
 

Digi

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That's fantastic help guys.

My thinking at the moment is to go with the Core 2 Duo which should let me add in the 24" Widescreen within the rough budget I have.