Help Me Compare Two New Mac Pros?

I am tasked with doing a comparison of a 4-Core 3.7GHz 12GB 250SSD Dual D300 vs a 6-Core 3.5GHz 16GB 500SSD Dual D700 Mac Pro for my employer (an educational institution with a somewhat constrained budget). I can of course render some timelines and see what the differences are, but I am wondering if there are certain tasks and/or filters, titles etc that will specifically show up the differences in memory and GPU. In addition to FCPX I also have Motion, Compressor and Adobe CC (which I mostly just use for Photoshop, personally).

Tips, educated guesses and alternate configuration suggestions most welcome!

8-core, dual 700's have been shown in several published benchmarks to be the sweet spot. The dual 700's for sure, in my studio's testing. Real improvement show up in the 8-core, but not beyond.

Thanks, Ben.

I should clarify: the 6-Core Dual D700 above is the best machine I can get, although if another configuration in the same or lower budget range would be better I could suggest it. I have one of each and have to test them head-to-head and hope that I can convince the bean counters that the better machine will increase my productivity enough to be worth it. I do a lot of DVD->Streaming conversions, lots of basic timeline rendering from FCPX and transcodes for streaming, DVD building in DVDSP (yes, still), lots of format conversions using both Compressor and AME.

When I am advise clients, I try to take into account what is the primary app that will be used on that machine. If it's FCP X, then the D700s will be great. (Esp since there aren't upgrades for the GPUs yet)

The performance sweet spot was set by Apple to the reviewers who they sent nMP test units, however this is not the financial sweet spot. The 6-core has that.

In terms of FCP X use, there isn't a ton of performance difference between the 6&8-cores. www.barefeats.com/tube05.html

In terms of money, the wholesale price of the Quad Core CPU is about $350, the 6-Core is $650.

The jump is the 8-core which retails for $2150 followed by the 12-core which goes for $2700! Keep in mind, this is just for the chip.

The manufacturing die process of the 8-core is far more complex, which is why to get just two more yet slower cores on one chip is such a price hike.

My 2¢ is if they aren't going to be shooting a lot of 6K Red footage that needs to be played back in realtime in Resolve or Red Cine X, a 6-Core will be plenty as long as they optimize to pores first.

Should they ever need that, the CPU is upgradeable later. as of now, the GPUs are not.

The quad iMacs are still a great performance to dollars machine, and they come with a really nice screen.

Thanks, Darren! iMacs will be our personal/auxiliary machines, and for our NLE workhorses it'll be either the 4-core/D300 or the 6-core/D700.

I'm hoping for tips on what filters, titles etc. might most show up the differences. Do they all leverage the GPUs pretty equally, or are some more CPU dependent?

Check out the barefeats link from my previous post, there is some good info there on various FCP X filters. They also have a DaVinci Resolve benchmark post on their site.

When you say the 6-core D700s, do you mean that you are having the 6-Cores custom upgraded to the D700s?

Or are you getting the stock config 6-Core D500s? The other stock config is the Quad-Core D300s.

The D500s are still very good cards, but if they can swing the D700s, it will probably be worth it in the long run since Apple gets to decide if there are ever upgrades to their custom GPU form factor.

The CPU, SSD and RAM are all upgradable.

Darren, thank you again! I will check out the link before I start my tests.

I guess they did a custom BTO on the first machine we got, the 6-Core D700s- that does ring a bell. Sounds like of all the options, the initial GPU may be the most important, since we are on a 7-year computer upgrade cycle (aeons in computer time).

Thanks again for all your feedback-- very appreciated.