[Jim Mcnitt]

Thanks everyone for pointing out a couple of aspects of the Eight-Core Mac Pro that I hadn’t considered, particularly:

– With 8 Cores you can have 2-3 of them used for your FCP render while you run say a compressor cluster jobb in the background at nearly full speed.

– With 4 Cores you can have 2-3 of them used for your FCP renders while you won’t have that much head-room for background operators (given there will likely be some head-room).

Although my budget precludes a 2.93 GHz Eight-core, the ability to run Compressor in the background while rendering in FCP (even if those renders are somewhat slower on a 2.26 GHz Eight-core) makes the most sense for my workflow.

Another factor that I hadn’t originally considered is 3D-software–I use several modeling programs–that CAN take advantage of the Eight-core to speed rendering times which typically now take between 12 and 40 hours for a 30-second for a 600-frame 1920×1080 HD render. Even if I’m rendering on another computer, the ability to include an Eight-Core Mac Pro in a 3D networked render farm could be significant.

Thanks again!
–jim