I'm specing a new workstation, the emphasis is on parametric compute speed ie. modelling rather than FEA (though I do some) it will also spend time rendering from 3ds. However given that everything is multi-core now the threaded jobs will be fast(ish) anyway.
I cant seem to determine what it the most powerful cpu per core ie. fastest for a single thread like IV modelling.
It seems the contenders are:
X5677 3.46GHz 4 Core 1333 DDR
X5680 3.33GHz 6 Core 1333 DDR
W3680 3.33GHz 6 Core 1333 DDR
Core i7 980X 3.333GHz 6 Core 1066 DDR
the 980X is on the next archetecture which apparently is just a 32nm version of the previous w/ faster encription calc.
It also seems to make sense to have a CUDA GPU as this may (hopefully) take some load in the future.
this may be an academic question as I'm pretty sure the performance of each will be very similar in all cases.
thoughts?
