| Dear all,
OK, so I know this thread rears its ugly head every once in a while, but I am currently considering an upgrade, and the chips available at the moment fall into two distinct groups.
I think I will end up with Intel Core 2 Duo, but my question is, for EASE, would I be better off with a Q6600 (which is a quad core, 2.4GHz) or an E6700, which is only a dual core, but runs at a slightly higher clock speed (2.7GHz). Just for the heck of it, would a dual Xeon (eg a Mac Pro running Windows) run any faster, or would the relatively "single-threaded" nature of EASE gain no benefit?
The other question is graphics capability. My current machine is a "workstation" with an FX1400 graphics card. However, a "gaming" machine with a card like a geforce 8800GTS looks like it would trounce the performance of my FX1400, but if you compare a machine like a Dell Precision 390 (workstation) to a Dimension 9200, you seem to pay a lot for the workstation-class CAD certifications - the cheaper machine has plenty of brute horsepower. Is there any reason why I should buy another workstation over a bog-standard desktop?
Thanks for your time.
Steve. |
