Westmere @ 32nm :)

[one-shot]

Now that Bloomfield is out at 45nm, it is tempting to not jump on the bandwagon and rejoice. However, Westmere is hopefully coming out in Q4 of 09 or Q1 of 10. I have heard rumors that Westmere is going to have 6 cores and 12 threads through HT. Does waiting till then sound like a decent plan? I have a Conroe @ 3.7Ghz and it serves me well for now, but, I will be doing lots of CAD and 3d modeling this fall for my program. I may need the extra processing power for my application so it may justify the wait. What do you all think?

 

[Just_An_Engineer]

Now that Bloomfield is out at 45nm, it is tempting to not jump on the bandwagon and rejoice. However, Westmere is hopefully coming out in Q4 of 09 or Q1 of 10. I have heard rumors that Westmere is going to have 6 cores and 12 threads through HT. Does waiting till then sound like a decent plan? I have a Conroe @ 3.7Ghz and it serves me well for now, but, I will be doing lots of CAD and 3d modeling this fall for my program. I may need the extra processing power for my application so it may justify the wait. What do you all think?

Personally I'd say save your money and invest in either a Quaddro or FireGL card. You're going to see a much larger increase in performance in most CAD/3D modeling programs from a good OpenGL card than you will from a faster processor, especially since your current processor is already pretty fast. Just be sure to find out what cards the programs you will be using get along with first. Some programs like Quaddro and some like FireGL. Very few seem to like both for whatever reason.

 

[roofus]

+1 Engineer. Some apps pee down their leg with the wrong card between the FireGL or the Quaddro. You may be the first person I have seen mention that here and it certainly is the truth.

 

[rangers]

you dont need a fireGL card for OpenGL i think all ati cards will do OpenGL but nvidia will only do it on there Quaddro cards, i could be wrong but dont think so

 

[roofus]

i think Engineer was just trying to underscore that a card may benefit him more. then he made a factual point that which card will benefit him will probably boil down to which app he uses. Nvidia cards can do OpenGL. I run OperGL on some of my older games that i cant break myself away from for cleaner gameplay as the games seem confused by DX10 lol

 

[Just_An_Engineer]

you dont need a fireGL card for OpenGL i think all ati cards will do OpenGL but nvidia will only do it on there Quaddro cards, i could be wrong but dont think so

All graphics cards (including Radeon and Geforce) do support OpenGL, but that doesn't mean they will necessarily accelerate the different CAD and 3D modeling programs. Many of these programs will look for a specific graphics driver to be installed in order to function properly. For example, you may have a Geforce card that uses the same GPU as a Quaddro card but if you aren't using the Quaddro driver the program will not allow hardware acceleration because it doesn't support the Geforce drivers. The same is true for Radeon and FireGL cards. As I mentioned before, there are some programs that will only work with Quaddro cards and others that will only work with FireGL cards (and when I say "work" I mean allow hardware acceleration).