[giacc]

Hi again,

I have 3 computers at home. Will it be the same if I make a cooperative render on them (2 pentium 4 + 1 Athlon dual core = 4 cores) that if I buy a 4-core computer? The difference is that I will invest $0 if my current setup of computers works decently.

Thanks in advance.

[casey]

In my experience, modern Core 2 Quad computers are considerably more than four times faster than Pentium 4 computers at the same clock rate.

I don't have any experience with Athlon dual core machines.

- Casey

[zoppo]

4 pcs (1 core + 1 core +1 core + 1 core) would be faster than 1x quad.
you loose some computing power because of the multi-processor / multi-core management overhead. in cinebench you can see that very easy, e.g. quad with only 1 core computing: 3500 - quad with 4 cores computing: 12000 - 2xquad with 8 cores: 20000

but in real life cpus with only one core are so outdated, they don't match a quad's core.

otoh amd x2 are still quite good: i have one x2 5000+/ 2x2.5ghz (for banking and internet ) at home and one of my quads with 4x3.4ghz is only three times faster.

but try for yourself: use benchwell in coop mode and compare it to the benchwell index.

[Bubbaloo]

Pentium 4's are not hardly worth using for rendering. Check out the benchwell statistics.