Quad or eight core?

[dude69]

Have a choice for my new work PC.

I will be running Visual Studio 2008

Either: 2 * Xeon 5320 Quad 1.86GHz. Total Eight cores
Or 2 * Xeon 5140 Dual 2.33GHz. Total Four cores.

[TheFaQQer]

Why not 1 x quad core for the time being, then you can always drop another processor in at some stage if you need to?

[xoggoth]

If you are running Vista, as many as possible, a few hundred preferably.

[AtW]

Quad will be more than enough - I run VS 2005 on dual core AMD and it's fine, just have plenty of RAM (at least 2 GB), just had VS 2008 installed the other day but have not used it much, but it seems to be more or less inline with VS 2005 requirements.

Best get PC with single quad core, rather than twin dual cores - you don't need Xeons for this, get Q6600 it is a fine quad core chip, I use it in one of my servers, the other one uses dual quad cores Xeons, and more yet use dual cores

[threaded]

I'll just weigh in now that I've had a half hour playing with VS2008... It all seems IO bound, so I can't really tell the difference on the number of cores. I swapped in a solid state hard disk, now that speeded things up.

HTH

[AtW]

A dual core is more than enough for a VS. But if you write software that should use multiple cores than having quad core is very good.

[dude69]

i ain't paying.

so i just want the best option of those two, nothing else besides those two options

[AtW]

i ain't paying.

But someone else is. So the best option is to give that person good analysis and conclude that you will do fine with a quad core, which would also save money to whoever is paying: this means you will be in their good books - priceless, eh?

[OwlHoot]

Talking about multi-core, I found that 7-zip won't run on any of them, even dual-core, which seems very odd. Let's hope the author fixes it pronto, because it is one of the best compression programs, far better than cranky old WinZip, and is free (open-source actually).

[d000hg]

I used 7-zip just the other week on a Dual-core Athlon PC.