New Maya Workstation Build - Many Questions! Magny-Cours or Westmere?

[Dimitriman]

Some clearer directions are beginning to emerge; it's imperative that I wait & look at the upcoming CPU's. Spoke to Movieman as well who gave me incredible wealth of information.

As of right now, I have 2 options - both looking solid, one holding the edge over the other.

Option one is a 16-Core "Interlagos" based system; Dual socket G34 motherboard with 2 * Interlagos; giving me a 32-Core workstation. The upside of this is that it can be had in my budget; the downside would be the core speeds.

Option two is the upcoming SB-E platform; supposedly a Dual Socket might be in the works for that. 6-Core or 8-Core SB-E's running on a dual socket LGA2011 board. Upside of this system would be core speeds - inevitably, this would smoke the 32-Core Interlagos. The downside - pricey!! I may not be able to fit this in my budget.

I'm set on the nVidia Quadro 2000 as the workstation GPU and 24GB DDR3 ram; so it's a matter of pitting Interlagos against SB-E ... for which I need to wait.

6c/12t Xeons/SBE would not smoke 16 core Interlagos across the board. For heavily multithreaded tasks I would still put my money on the Opteron. Remember it is still 24 threads vs 32.