[LAU] New workstation | DAW pc

[rosea grammostola]

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Fritz Meissner <meissner.fritz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 September 2010 21:18, rosea grammostola <rosea.grammostola at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the info. After some reading and discussion, the i3 or i5 seems
>> to be good options indeed.
>> After reading this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/7 and considering
>> my budget
>> It looks like I better go for a i3 540 or something close to that,
>> compared to a i5...
>>
> My perspective on the processors is a little different. If you go for the
> Arrandale i5-750 you get 4 cores (but no hyperthreading or GPU) instead of 2
> cores with hyperthreading plus on-chip GPU. You can see the equivalent
> Anandtech review for Arrandale at http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832 . If
> you compare the benchmarks in the review you quoted, the i5-750 has a
> Sysmark score of 217 versus 204 for the i3-540, which is only a 6%
> difference. However, if you look at multiple benchmarks (see Tom's hardware
> comparison chart
> http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/compare,2414.html?prod[4483]=on&prod[4487]=on
> (which is for i5-530, not i5-540 but is still relevant)) the differences are
> often much greater. In particular, if you look at the Adobe Photoshop Image
> processing benchmark, which is the only one that I know is definitely using
> parallel processing on all available cores, then the 4 core processor is
> twice as fast (unsurprisingly). My expectation is that as time goes on more
> and more compute-intensive applications (such as audio and video encoding
> and compiling) will start to use multiple cores fully, so it makes sense to
> buy for the future.
>
> Another factor is memory bandwidth; assuming that some audio work is memory
> intensive (in particular playback using large sample banks) then I think
> this is important. The i5-750 has a memory bandwidth of 16.9 GB/s vs. 11.6
> for the i3-530 (from the comparison chart); this is a 46% improvement.
> Compounding this is the fact that the onboard GPU is using main memory as
> video memory, so that memory bandwidth is also being shared with all the
> video data, which could eat up a large chunk of the capacity. So the i5 must
> come out way ahead on memory bandwidth available for the CPU.

Ok, but I when doing work with photoshop or 3D video, it's better to
buy a videocard. This is also possible on a i3...

An i3 is more energyfriendly afaik.
But yes, more cores could be good, the question is from which point
it's really a nice upgrade...

I'm interested in more views on this topic... I have pretty little
experience with hardware and interpreting benchmarks scores...

\r