What is going to be faster 8 core 2008 Mac pro or Quad core i7 with virtual cores?

[Jimmypoo]

I cored 8 Golden Delicious apples this weekend.

[mikebw]

Adobe Premiere CS5 can really utilize an nVidia video card for rendering versus an ATI. No sure about FCP X.

[Jimmypoo]

Any reason why an app that uses one GPU wouldn't use the other? Has the GPU market split to that point now? Like the vector instructions on Intel (or AVX) vs. Altivec, but to the extent that apps are supporting use of one GPU brand over the other?

[mattkime]

Jimmypoo wrote:
Any reason why an app that uses one GPU wouldn't use the other? Has the GPU market split to that point now? Like the vector instructions on Intel (or AVX) vs. Altivec, but to the extent that apps are supporting use of one GPU brand over the other?

It goes in cycles of innovation and standardization.

[bazookaman]

Yep. I replaced my 2 2.6 dual core processors with 2 5355 2.6 quad core processors. Same speed but double the cores. I can definitely tell a difference just using the butt dyno. Everything "feels" faster. I would have loved to get the faster processors like MacArtist but they were prohibitively expensive. I think he got a deal on his. The best thing to do is just keep an eye on ebay. They pop up from time to time for varying prices. But around $200 is a good deal.

As far as installing, it is quite a task. Not difficult. Just laborious and time consuming. You have to remove the ram and the ram chassis, the video card, the fan, the first 2 hard drives and the heat sinks. After that it's a cake walk. You'll need to get some replacement thermal paste to put on the new CPUs. And that crap gets EVERYWHERE. And it's nice and sticky and gooey. You also need a LONG driver to unscrew the heat sinks. No way around that. All in all, it was a bit stressful as you are removing so much stuff and messing with some important stuff. But worth it IMHO. My geek bench score literally doubled after replacing the processors.

I also replaced added an SSD for the boot drive and that has improved my boot speed immeasurably. As well as application launch.

This weekend I installed my blu-ray burner internally using the 2 extra SATA ports on the mobo. I ran one cable up to the optical bay and used a molex adapter for power. And ran the other cable to a PCI adapter thingie to give me one external SATA port. The whole thing cost me less than $10 including shipping.

If you've got any questions about the CPU upgrade shoot me a PM. My next (and last) upgrade for this machine will be a video card. Then I'm done.

[rz]

Just a note, the 2008 Mac Pro is the "3,1" model, and the 2006 is the "1,1". Make sure you know exactly what model you have before buying CPU's, or you might get the wrong ones.

[JoeH]

Back to the original question, which is faster is going to depend a lot on what you are processing. The i7's have a later, more efficient CPU core than the Xeon 5400's used in the 2008 Mac Pro's. But, with only 4 cores versus 8, there are only 4 FPU's for processing floating point calculations. The hyper-threading can help keep them more fully utilized, but if you have a lot of FP calculations the 8 cores will beat out the 4 at similar clock speeds. For other mixes the i7 will be a bit faster. In any case, both will be a definite improvement over your 4 core Mac Pro.