Workstation CPU: X5560 Nehalem OR E5620 Westmere

id get the e5620 as its got newer architecture and less old.

Here is the 2 CPU's compared to eachother:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/37109,47925

the x5560 wins on Clock Speed, Max Turbo Frequency, Bus/Core Ratio, System Bus, Max Memory Bandwidth

whereas the E5620 wins on Cache, Max Memory Size, Intel® Trusted Execution Technology

well its up to u but i prefer to have a newer architecture than older.

The x5560 is better, doesn't matter if it's older. Westmere was just a die shrink of nehalem and there wasn't much of a performance increase. Infact these tests show next to nil. (Look at the i7 970 westmere vs i7 960 nehalem. Although take into account it is 6 core westmere vs 4 core nehalem.) http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-com... Even giving it a 20% performance increase per clock (which it wasn't), it still would not make up for the lower speed.

interesting well my experience with xeons is limited, good arguments k1

+1

I would have also went with iceclock saying that newer architecture would have been better.

As I do not know much about Xeons.

thanks for ur kind words buddi  

after some research I decided that the processing power of my Thinkastation D10 with dual x5482 (harpertown / Penryn architecture) still outbenches a single x5560 or e5620 on both cinebench and cpumark.

I think I'm going to wait maybe another year and save up another grand and get a dual x5680 system (2x 6 core westmere), which truly is over 2x faster then my current system.

Thanks for all the great advice guys! for now I just spent a few hundred (gotta love ebay!) on a quadro 4800 (currently have a 4600) and 32gb ram to hold me over