[itsallgoode9]

Which one is better for Maxwell? I'm not sure what is better to get Maxwell rendering faster for a set dollar amount.

I'm currently working on Maxwell with a Q6600 6 gigs of ram but looking into building a new machine/s to use solely as a render node/s. Would buying more lower GHZ processors give a better performance than buying fewer high GHZ processors?

I haven't seen any benchmarks on benchwell with people having more than one Q6600 so i don't have anything to judge this on. The higher powered CPUS (3.0-3.2 or more) have a DRAMATIC speed increase compared to the Q6600s. For the money I could add I could add 2 or 3 lower powered Q6600s running at 2.4 ghz for the same price as those 3.0 or higher cpus...the Q6600s are dirt cheap now.

I'm assuming that more cores would be better, but I could be wrong..

Basically, if you had a set money amount to spend on render machines, what would be better for Maxwell performance?

[-Adrian]

Why not overclock Q6600 or Q9450? Seems like the best bang for the buck, if that's all you're looking for.

[itsallgoode9]

I don't want to base the choice on overclocking...just on base specs. If we end up getting many render nodes, it's not really practical overclocking 10 or 20 CPUS...it just opens doors for potential stability problems, and that would be a nightmare to troubleshoot with that many cpus.

Although my base compter is overclocked I don't want to do that for thre nodes.

[Mihai]

Perhaps you're looking at the benchwell scores wrong, the highest scores are from 4 CPU machines, in one motherboard.

[itsallgoode9]

Perhaps you're looking at the benchwell scores wrong, the highest scores are from 4 CPU machines, in one motherboard.

yes, but they are from EXPENSIVE, top of the line, $1,500 quadcore CPUS that are 3.0 ghz and above. Q6600's run at 2.4, but only cost $200. So for the price of one top of the line Xeon, i could get 6 Q6600's

I am reading benchwell correctly, but the problems is, nobody has more than single CPUs when it comes to the lower end Q6600 to make a comparison.

[Mihai]

I ment that the dramatic speed increase you see is because there are four of them. If you want to compare one Xeon to one Q6600 you can find benchmarks on the net, using Cinebench probably. Then you can compare the cost of buying 4 separate systems or one quadcore one. The Q6600 is a single slot CPU, you can't put more than one in one motherboard so that's why there are no benchmarks of such a system on benchwell.