Originally Posted by
borgmeyer
need4mospd, thanks for the input. However, we just placed the order yesterday for (3) Dell Precision T3500 systems based on the Xeon W3540 2.93Ghz processeor, which uses the same core as the i7's. Honestly, the users getting them will have to work really fast to take advantage of the horsepower, but we'll be using these for some time.
Regarding hyperthreading, I did some testing on some older Prestonia Xeon machines. The setup was (2) 3.06Ghz Xeon Prestonia's, varying whether or not hyperthreading was turned on (i.e., 2 cores vs. 4 "cores"). Using the 2009 benchmark, hyperthreading trimmed off about 40 points, but these are both 500+ scores. I imagine that in the i7's case, since Revit is only capable of using up to (4) cores, turning on hyperthreading wouldn't make much of a difference unless you had other processor intensive apps going on at the same time. It also appears that from your results that processing power of each virtual core is not diminished when hyperthreading is turned on.
It has always been my impression that software is usally about 5 years behind fully utilizing hardware. Out of curiosity, do you build your own systems, or do you use a manufacturer that allows overclocking? Thanks for the input.