Hi All,

We are getting in 3 new workstations that I spec'd personally, as follows:

Dell T7500

Windows 7 64bit

(1) W5590 Quad 3.33GHz Nehalam EP

Hyperthreaded - Y

- Passmark 8,597, Rank #1

6.4GT/s FSB Turbo

12GB DDR3 RDIMM 1333MHz

Memory Bandwith 40GB/s+ (Theorectical)

(1) 1.0GB Nvidia Quadro FX3800

2nd Gen

Memory Interface 256-bit

51.2 GB/s

CUDA Cores 192

SLI

Triangles/Second 300 Million

Texel Fill Rate 38.0 Billion

(2) SATA 10k Drives

A killer machine that will take another processor and go SLI someday if I can go ever back to (2) monitors.

Or, I could stay where I'm at and angle for a Nehalam EX 2x8 core machine at some later date...16 little windows in Process Manager makes me happy just thinking about it. Here's where I am now:

Dell T7400

Windows 7 64bit

(2) X5460 Quad 3.16GHz Harpertown

Hyperthreaded - N

- Passmark 5,105, Rank #14

1330.0MHz FSB

20GB DDR2 FB-DIMM PC2-5300 667MHz

Memory Bandwith 12.8GB/s+

(2) 768MB Nvidia Quadro FX4600

1st GEN

Memory Interface 384-bit

67.2 GB/sec

CUDA Cores 112

SLI

Triangles/Second 250 Million

Texel Fill Rate 24.0 Billion

(2) SAS 15k Drives

If I only ran SW it would be a no-brainer, but I'm often in SW&3dMAX or 3dMAX&PS&AI at the same time plus Firefox open all day. So multiple cores are pretty key. My inclination is to get my hands on the Nehalam machine and swap my FX4600's and SAS drives into it. But the 2nd Gen Quadro is probably appreciably faster, the T7500 doesn't ship SLI capable anyway...more Dell strangeness.

Opinions?