Mac pro questions

[paul_esc]

Hi all, I'm about to buy a mac pro 8 core Westmere 2011 and have a few questions if someone can help?

The new 8 core machine has 2.4GHz processors whereas the model from a few years back had 2.8 or 3GHz. Does that mean the newer models are slower,
or is 2.4GHz as fast or faster than 3GHz these days?

I do a bit of 3D work using Cinema 4d. Why would I benefit from a 2nd graphics card, I thought the rendering was done using the processors?

Many thanks.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

THe newer processors, though operating at a slower speed end up being better performers than the older processors. Additionally, having more cores at a slower speed as compared to less cores at a faster speed yield better performance as well.

For example, on the iMac's, we have the i3, i5 and i7 processors..the i3 processors are at 3GHz and 3.3Ghz while the i7 is at 2.9 GHz..just by numbers alone, the i7 should be slower, but the i3 is a dual-core processor while the i7 is a quad-core processor..

The brute processing of graphics/video is done on the processors, but the rendering of them on the screen and other aspects of it is usually handled by the graphics processor, so getting a beefy graphics card with sufficient RAM and adding an additional graphics card to boost performance will yield an overall performance boost..

The graphics CPU has various pipelines to help in rendering of said graphics and more and more applications make very effective use of this since you don't want to burden the main processor with tasks that aren't it's native strength..

Regards

 

[paul_esc]

Great, thanks very much for the excellent explanation.

Paul.