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i7 six-core vs Xeon six-core for AutoCAD Revit

idata
Employee
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We currently have 6 PCs running Xeon Quad-Core for our Revit department. Now, we need two more PCs for Revit department. I would like to know which of these CPUs I should use i7 six-core or Xeon six-core.

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idata
Employee
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In our side-by-side testing of i7 Extreme and Xeon X5500 series systems on behalf of a long time client we discovered that the Xeon based system was always faster in rendering their currency trading charts (4-9 minutes on C2D E8xxx series with 4GB RAM on start up for baseline, ~2-3 minutes i7 Extreme with 8GB, and ~75-90 seconds with X5580 with 8GB).

The app ran a primary thread as well as three additional secondary threads. So one core was always pinned while the other three moved about in utilization. A Hex-Core would provide room for additional OS threads and the like.

All systems were configured with X25-M SSDs to render the I/O question moot.

A Revit discussion on CPUs: http://www.revitforum.org/showthread.php/74-Revit-Hardware-CPU http://www.revitforum.org/showthread.php/74-Revit-Hardware-CPU

Where time is of the essence, meaning work faster = paid more, such as our currency trader we configure systems as follows:

  • Intel X5500 or X5600 series CPU

     

    • Unless the application is proven to use more than one or two threads 1 CPU is good.

       

  • Intel Workstation Board

     

  • 2x (two) 4GB 1333MHz ECC for 8GB

     

    • Or: 2x (two) 8GB 1333MHz ECC for 16GB

       

  • Intel RS2BL040 RAID + BBU

     

  • 2x (two) 160GB Intel X25-M Solid-State Drives

     

The systems would be configured with a single parition plus the 100MB one that Win7 places at the front.

Philip Elder

MPECS Inc.

http://blog.mpecsinc.ca Blog Site

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