quad core or 8-core? which GHz?

[Paolo Piazza]

I would like to buy a power mac; in which cases you would choose a quad core and in which cases you would prefere to have an 8 core?
which is the main difference in terms of practical use between the followings processors:
1) 2.26 GHz
2) 2.66 GHz
3) 2.93 GHz

[Linwood Ferguson]

I'm not a mac person, but I will offer from expensive lessons learned -- save money by staying 1 or 2 steps down from the highest speed processor, then spend it on memory to get the best speed (that's assuming money is an object -- if not, get big memory AND the fastest processor).

For personal machines (and based on windows but I bet the same) two cores are great, four adds benefit but not a lot, and anything more is likely not to be helpful. You just don't have enough parallel processing needs in a personal machine.

What helps even more is memory, memory, memory -- fast and large, and also fast disks (not necessarily big disks).

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Paolo

Good advice from Fergeson Would go for option number two and get as much ram as you can, PS won't be able to use it all but for the next PS release we should be fine on the Mac side !!

[Jeff Donald]

I'll preface my comments by saying that I used to work for Apple. If you're interested in speed comparisons I would look at this site:

http://www.barefeats.com/

In general the previous comments are correct, that the biggest bang for the buck is in second tier processors. The fastest processors may offer a 10% to 15% speed advantage, but cost 25% more to achieve those results. Ram is key to speeding up applications like Photoshop and Lightroom. If you can afford it, put at least 8Gb of ram in the system but more can help, but you get into a situation of diminishing return for your dollar (or Lira).

[Chris Ober]

Interesting site, Jeff. Thanks!