[Soth3d]

What if I will decide to render from RAM Disc or 4 discs RAID Drive?

[cgbeige]

got my new Mac Pro 8-core 2.66 GHz Nehalem Xeon:

2200.04 (4m 52s)

my Penryn Xeon 2.8 8-core:

1272.81 (11m 02s)

wow.

[Bubbaloo]

WOW is correct! I officially hate you.

[cgbeige]

ya, well I paid through the nose for it. Lenovo and Dell are coming out with Nehalem Xeon workstations in April and they will be much cheaper for sure

[monochrome]

Beige, just curious: do you have triple pairings of RAM for each CPU? I just got the 2.26 with 8gb and I'm wondering if it's getting slowed down by the even pairings...

[cgbeige]

I have triple pairs but I did extensive testing for a review of the Mac Pro and with Maxwell 1.7 64-bit mxcl, it really doesn't make any major difference with 8 slots filled. I think I got 2203 vs 2213 in benchwell. I'm personally fine with 12 GB of RAM but if you'll definitely need the 8 GB. I sold the 6 GB on eBay and bought 12 GB from crucial

[cgbeige]

my review of the new 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro (the one that gets 2214 in Benchwell) is here for anyone interested:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/20 ... review.ars

[Bubbaloo]

Nice article, thanks for posting.

[dmeyer]

I ran some new benchwells today, curious to find any performance difference between XP64 and OSX on identical hardware.

My test machine:
Mac Pro early 2008
8-core 3.2 GHZ
16GB RAM
Dual boot: XP64 and OSX 10.5.6

OSX Scores: (all using 1.7.1. numbers presented are an average of 3 runs)

32 bit Maxwell, via GUI: 1169 in 9:10
32 bit Maxwell, via CLI: 1176 in 9:07

64 bit Maxwell, via CLI: 1105 in 9:43

XP64 Scores:

64 bit Maxwell, via GUI: 1200 in 8:58
64 bit Maxwell, via CLI: 1195 in 9:00

[dmeyer]

The super-fast Q9300 was an error btw, so disregard that. The others are accurate.

Since 1.7 doesn't seem to show a noteworthy speed difference, i might as well keep the 1.6 list on the front page. No point in starting a new one until the core gets some major rework.

I had an idea about collapsing all entries for the same CPU (e.g. Q6600) into a single row showing the averaged result of all. One could then open the column to see all contributing entries.

Don't know if i can code that, but it would seem like a wonderful solution to the ever growing size.

This seems like a good idea to me. Would make the list more readable and smooth out any outliers.

[piroshki]

Hi all,

Well, with Benchwell not updated in a while its tough to buy the correct machine!

I am considering purchasing the latest Nehalem based Mac, 8 core, perhaps 2.26 ghz. Messire on this forum gets a benchmark of around 1600, which for the money is a fantastic score. We are also looking at the Dell, 8 core, running the E5410 processors at 2.33 ghz (about the same price) and as far as I can tell from Benchwell the machine isn't nearly as fast with a benchmark of about 965...

What I am really confused about is if I go online to other benchmark sites for processors (cpubenchmark.net), then I get that the Dell processor (Harpertown, E5410) is faster than the apple processor (Nehalem, 5520). I

Could this be correct? The mac has DDR3 memory, the Dell DDR2.... Could this really be due to memory only?

T.

[dmeyer]

Hi all,

Well, with Benchwell not updated in a while its tough to buy the correct machine!

I am considering purchasing the latest Nehalem based Mac, 8 core, perhaps 2.26 ghz. Messire on this forum gets a benchmark of around 1600, which for the money is a fantastic score. We are also looking at the Dell, 8 core, running the E5410 processors at 2.33 ghz (about the same price) and as far as I can tell from Benchwell the machine isn't nearly as fast with a benchmark of about 965...

What I am really confused about is if I go online to other benchmark sites for processors (cpubenchmark.net), then I get that the Dell processor (Harpertown, E5410) is faster than the apple processor (Nehalem, 5520). I

Could this be correct? The mac has DDR3 memory, the Dell DDR2.... Could this really be due to memory only?

T.

Yes it could be correct. I've seen scores for the Nehalem Mac Pros over 2200 on other sites. Apparently Maxwell takes ridiculously good advantage of the Hyperthreading you get in the 55xx series.

[cgbeige]

If you read my review, you can see that there are instances where a faster Penryn Xeon CPU is faster for poorly multithreaded code (like iTunes). Maxwell is really the application that is the poster boy for the Nehalem and hyperthreading. The 2.26 GHz Nehalem Xeon will definitely outperform the 3.0 GHz Penryn Xeon in Maxwell. You can see the difference between the two architectures here (Maxwell is at the bottom):

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/20 ... view.ars/8

[-Adrian]

Yeh post here if you got new results, i'm trying but it's all or nothing with the update.

Someone has to be the first to buy a new Mac / CPU either way

[cgbeige]

well that review is my personal result - 2214 with 1.7 64-bit and a 2.66 GHz 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro.