They're not when it comes to the i7s. Two processors are always better than one.
Value, maybe? Overall speed? No. My Mac Pro can destroy any Core 2 Duo from the same era. Same holds with the new Mac Pros and i7s. Again, more expensive, but to me, worth it.
Faster computers are more expensive. Shocking.
Hey goMac, I'll just stick with the
facts; at least from my professional experience using Mac Pros (which BTW, are great). When I initially got into all of this I wasn't expecting the end result that my Mac Hak Pro to be better than my friends new Dual CPU Mac Pro at he just purchased at the same time I purchased mine. (Now this test was done about the time when the new 6 cores just came out) and we didn't use GeekBench or any other rendering test app; just Photoshop & Final Cut Pro. I can tell you I was shocked. My ONE W3680 (same as i7 980X) CPU (OC'd comfortably to 4.2GHz), 12GB Corsair 1600MHz RAM, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 rev.1 Mobo, & Corsair H100 Watercooling CPU block, & XFX Radeon HD 6870,
BEAT his two 2.66 GHz 6-core Xeon X5650 (same as running 2 non-OC'd i7 970) CPUs in our rendering tests.
Mind you he spent close to $6,000 for his Mac Pro, while I spent only $1,600 mine - a
73% savings. The amazing part about this is I could have paid another $1,600 to create the same machine and linked them to create a mini rendering farm. In fact I could have built 3 of these Hackies and linked them together to make them 3 times faster, and my cost would've only been $4,800; with $1,200 left over for a nice 8TB NAS to back up all my rendered vids.
Now we can go back and forth, but I have personal proof of what I experienced because of actual testing, where you on the other hand... well... whatever... (Don't like it when I say it like that, do you?).
"Shocking." Nobody does, so I hope the demeaning comments will stop now...
Now going into rendering test scores to keep things fair. Respectively, this is where I rely on GeekBench (GB) v2.2.6 or higher. Now are they the end all of rendering test apps? No, but it's by far the best one out there along with NovaBench 1.1. But lets stick to one rendering test app - GB. To say that I'm now on page 2 (as one of the top performers out there) at
34771 while others are out there dangling on page 50 in the 20,000's (like I was before) says a lot. So when you say that a Mac Pro can "destroy" certain i7 CPUs, you should rethink that first then just coming up with comments that aren't helpful.
Lastly, I can confidently put up my SR-2 setup with with my
Underclocked X5690's up against ANY top of the line Mac Pro out there and my machine (and any one else's SR-2 for that matter if it
tweaked correctly) will simply do better (thanks to Tutor and many other mentors out there like him). It's a matter of having the ability to
tweak your system, not just put it together. Even keeping everything at stock speeds, my system was right there at 24,000+ when it came to GB scores. The same that you would find on the most current Maxed out Mac Pro out there, and I only (again as I said before) only spent $4,000 compared to the $11,000 that you'd have to spend to still not come close to rendering power of my SR-2 setup.
So there's really not much more else to say on this except that I'm grateful for the ability to build a wonderful unit that I can use and the experience that comes with it... Later...
