Is a 6 Core overkill for me?

[percival504]

I cannot believe you took the time to be so helpful.

You and Phillipma1957 are a testament to how these boards should work. What an incredible wealth of information! It is worth getting any Mac Pro to join such a fine group of people.

Deconstruct60, you make a lot of sense. In fact, you are worrying me, because your good advice is like the whole "I can only tell you about that bear..." thing. The upgrade appears to be something I am capable of, but I think my DIY might fail just for that reason alone. Your solid advice might jinx me man.

I hate to impose upon you again, but how would I spread the I/O load over disks? I was going to boot from the X25-E and put my "Home" folder on a WD RE4 or Caviar Black (and use the 2 remaining disks for backups and storage of data I do not need on a daily basis). In what additional ways can spread the I/O load amongst disks? (And I can use SSDs wherever and however they make sense, so if you have any advice for configuration please share; all these sequential read and write numbers aren't so important to me as IOPS and I would love to know how to actually maximize the use of SSDs for that purpose - I am sure they are more useful than the the whole drag race thing that I always see in reviews.

One thing I am thinking is to try the 2.8, or 3.2, with 24GB RAM (I found a great deal); buy the W3680 and do the DIY if it is necessary. If not, return it.

I cannot thank each of you (the thread participants) enough. I am learning a lot.

P-504.

Not quite. The Hexcore cost more than a quad core. All the money you spend on those two additional cores cannot be spent on RAM, SSD, or other things that might improve I/O ( which is the primary bottleneck).

The amount of RAM is limited to the number of RAM slots attached to the CPU package. The Hex and Quad offerings both offer a maximum of 4 RAM slots to fill. So what you need is more expensive memory to put into those 4 limited slots (e.g., 8GB DIMMs ).

The dual package models (starts off at 8) have 4 RAM slots per package. With 8 total slots to fill you can stuff more RAM into those boxes.





I'm not sure how that is relevant since you wish to run an abnormal workload on the box ( server + VMs + normal apps). I'm 99.99% certain that any "normal app benchmarks" you might have seen that placed MBP running faster than a 2.8 or 3.2 were not running that workload mix.
Any one of those subgroups perhaps. But all three at the same time, I extremely doubt it. Either that or the 2.8/3.2 was running stock RAM (3GB) levels. Pushed up into the 16-32GB range where actually using that much RAM the Mac Pro is better.

For example, some folks get stuck on the first graph on this page (speed test).
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-MacBookProFeb2011-Photoshop.html

However, if you get to the "Medium test" below you'll see that the Mac Pro 2.8 beats the MBP when it comes to doing something that actually uses 16GB worth of memory., Yeah the Hex is a bit faster but you also pay more. Having enough memory to load everything all at once is critical to making the spinning cursor disappear. As soon as apps (a VM, photoshop, reader, web browser, etc.) start competing for memory resources the cursor will pop up.

Another perspective of range of performance if have "too little" or "too much" RAM with respect to the workload demands.

http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-Upgrade-CaseStudy-MacPro-Memory.html

Hex 3.33GHz doesn't save you if you only have 3GB of RAM in the box.



Yes. If you have multiple users or multiple apps running at the same time then that workload can be spread over multiple cores. (an operating system with several daemons running also can spread work over multiple cores. )



Lion requires more memory to run without spinning cursors. If you are going to run it natively ( and in VMs ) you'll need more memory.





Yeah.
" ... While there are no pins to bend/break on these LGA CPUs, if anything goes wrong the socket is toast. In this case, both the socket and CPU were beyond saving. ... "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2800/11

hidden behind many of these "void the warranty" discussions are implicit presumptions that warranty wasn't really needed anyway. Upgrades can be done without fraking the board, but Apple doesn't really optimize making the swap easy or safe for the untrained.

If the Hex upgrade is within your risk threshold fine. But I'd rank order that upgrade last among the other mentioned. Something like

i. enough RAM for all foreseeable apps/VMs/etc. combinations. (Photoshop + VM + server software/caching )

ii. enough Disks to spread I/O load. (SSDs for highly independent workload elements except for bulk data. )

iii. back-up infrastructure ( external disks and card to get to disks. )

.........

last. hex upgrade.


IMHO, I'd wait for new Mac Pros and make "hex upgrade" unnecessary. Much of the "get the Hex" chant around here is primarily because the Quads in the single package models are dated. That's because the Xeon 3600 line was jacked up. There was only effectively one model and Apple backfilled the rest of the line up with 3500 series minor speed bumped packages. Once, the E5 1600 series online Apple can leave that cluster-screwed baggage behind.