Quad core vs 8 core
 

I know I've asked a thousand and one question in here, and I truly appreciate and value the information I receive.

Ok I am going to be ordering my new Mac Pro next week. And I wanted to see, one more time what everyone thinks. I can afford a 2009 8 core tower, or a 2010 quad core. I'm going to upgrade memory either way I go, amongst other things. (add I/O card, drives, etc). In the long run, would I regret going quad core over 8 core? I plan on running Final Cut studio, Adobe CS5, and maybe down the road cinema 4d.

I had thought of upgrading the video card to the quadro 4000, but think from my reading, the ati card might be a better option.

Thank you for all the help.
Jeff

Go 8-core especially if you are going to do a lot of rendering of MPEG2 or h264 in Compressor as you can set up a rendering cluster. If you plan to use Premier CS5, I am pretty sure that it uses all 8-cores unlike FCP which is limited to 4-cores as of this version. The mystery of FCP8 (besides when it will be released) is whether it will be as processor aware as Premier is now. We certainly hope so, for Apple's sake as well as ours. Anyway you look at it, an 8-core will be better for future developments even though it's an older computer. A four core is no reason for regrets if you plan on a small amount of filtering and effects. Standard filters such as the 3-way color corrector will give you real-time previews with 4 cores.

Upgrading the video card is really dependent on the programs you intend to give heavy use. Motion and Color both like better cards but if you don't plan to use them a lot, you'll be fine with the stock video card. FCP doesn't care about the card.

I cant remember off the top of my head which model introduced hyper threading, but it's worth noting that a hyper threaded system will have double the virtual cores, so if it's the 2010 model you'll still get 8 cores worth of processing,because of the hyper threaded virtual cores. Of course if it was the 2009 model, then you'd be trading 8 virtual cores for 16 virtual coressobest tolookinto that

The 2009 does support hyper threading. I'm pretty sure that's the route I'm going. I'm just such a geek when it comes to tech stuff, I always want the latest and greatest. I'm sure the 2009 with be plenty powerful. I plan on diving head first into After Effects, that is something I really want to get good at. Also I plan on learning Color. So an 8 core will definitely be a benefit for me.