Albert,
AC will take advantage of multiple processors in various areas. By having multiple threads, that work can be scheduled onto multiple processors (dual core) or pipelined in a multithreaded (not the same thing as dual core!!!) chip. See time estimates below. PlotMaker takes advantage of multithreading nicely during background updates .. you can continue to work on layouts as the updates are happening in BG AC and with the update dialogs showing the progress. LW in AC uses up to two processors.
When you say "I will have to choose", I assume that you now need the computer immediately and have to buy from a local store (Costco or Apple) and do not have time to have one shipped to you?
As I said earlier, the Costco configuration while very nice, does not include a dual core processor - only hyperthreading.
I've had a HT processor for some time, and you will only see about a 10% improvement in throughput with HT enabled ... compared with perhaps 90% improvement with dual core. Not within AC itself, but assuming you are rendering in Artlantis at the same time as working in AC for example. Within AC itself, the LW rendering engine WILL use two processors (threads) ... and so you will see a small improvement with the Costco HT processor over one without HT, but a significant improvement with dual core. Same thing with C4D and other mutiprocessor aware apps.
The Costco machine comes with 533MHz memory. Dell has 667 Mhz available on their web site. Better.
Costco comes with Media Edition ... the features of this machine are geared towards video/music/photos - using as a home DVR/etc - not necessarily CAD and an office environment...although the RAID drives and other specs will make it a speedy CAD station, too. (Even for video editing, I would want dual core ... I'm always waiting for my video editor to render footage. Not an issue with DVR though.)
At Dell site, you can configure with XP Professional, which works well in office networks, including mixed Mac ones (auto reconnect with saved passwords/etc).
Costco comes with Microsoft Works. You can configure with Office apps cheaply at Dell site.
A similarly configured machine, but with 667Mhz RAM, dual core 3GHz processor, XP Pro, and a 19" LCD monitor (no monitor at Costco), "free" shipping comes to 2,737. $537 more... which is probably worth the price difference.
For PURELY ArchiCAD work - for example, section regeneration which is a single-processor activity today - the 3.4 GHz single (HT) Costco processor will give you about 10% faster results than the dual core 3 GHz processor, as this is almost entirely processor dependent given enough memory. But, if you multitask and have llots of things happening on the computer at the same time - or use rendering engines that can use multiprocessors - the dual core should pull ahead easily.
Comparing to the Mac, again if speed is the issue, I've found a pretty much GHz to GHz equality for ArchiCAD and so the Mac would not keep up with the PC here. Minimally, 512MB shared with two processors is an insanely small amount of memory. You'd want to upgrade to 1GB minimum - and ideally 2GB or more IMHO.
For the initial cash outlay, the Dell gives better price/performance. From the amount of time one spends dinking with XP systems to keep them updated compared to OS X, the Mac might be cheaper in TCO?
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier • macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
