topic Re: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4? in Installation & update

Dual Xeon or Pentium 4?

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 13:44:01 GMT

Does anyone know whether a single Pentium 4 3.4Ghz would be better for ArchiCAD use than a Dual 2.6 Xeon?

I have priced up the components (about the same for the two systems)and am unsure which would be best as far as ArchiCAD is concerned.

I assume that the Xeon would be better with apps such as 3DS Max that support multiple processors.

Re: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4?

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:19:14 GMT

My experience has been that the Xeon is significantly faster than the Pentium 4, but this is just anecdotal from how different machines have "felt" to me. It's probably worth a look for some benchmarks to compare the two. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of the 2.6GHz Xeons would come close to or even beat the 3.6 P4 in floating point operations (aka FLOPS) which are (AFAIK) the most important measure of CAD performance.

The dual processors really come in handy when running some combination of ArchiCAD, PlotMaker, BGArchiCAD, Word, Excel, Photoshop, etc. at the same time. I find it is not at all uncommon to have all of these going at once, and then there are e-mail, browser, and system processes going on as well.

I repeat that I am no expert in this area, but from what I've seen the experts have a pretty wide range of opinions about rating processor performance. In any case, either machine should serve you well assuming the rest of the specs are good. I would lean toward the dually myself.

Re: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4?

Jefferson — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 02:10:02 GMT

Well if you've the thick skin to withstand some definite opinons try this link:

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=13

This site is for and about computer graphics, largley related to architecture and your certain get response.

Re: Dual Xeon or Pentium 4?

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 19:50:51 GMT

I'm using a Dual Xeon 3.6 Ghz, 1GB Ram an see no much difference with my co-worker PC Xeon 2.7 Ghz, 768MB Ram. I had a wrong tought that I could run a Rendering (minimized) and keep working in other plan but it doesn't work like that. If the price is your worry, I will go for the Single Xeon.

Regards,