X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

Max,

I don't know if Apple support dual boot for Windows. I have no idea what CPU they use. Traditionally, Apples used Motorola, then IBM PowerPC for the CPU and never used an Intel CPU common to Windows. As a result, an emulator software was needed to provide an abstaction layer between Windows and the Apple hardware so that Windows thought it was running on Win-PC hardware. Emulators usually add overhead that can reduce performance by 10% or so.

If you can get Chief and ray tracing running on a Mac.... please report the results. I doubt that they will be quick.

What a difference a week can make.

The Intel i7 3770 was released end of April. It went on sale in Australia last week. Am ordering one for the new system. Gave up on AMD.

The i7 3770 clocks about the same base and turbo clock speeds as the i7 2600, but it is on finer wafer die which reduces power consumption and heat and reputedly runs about 10% faster than the i7 2600.

The i7 2600 chip architecture was called Sandy Bridge. The new i7 3770 chip is called Ivy Bridge. While it is socket compatible with the previous chips, it needs a BIOS upgrade and new Win 7 drivers. All of which Shuttle have... so it's a Shuttle barebones to build into.

If you want a good looking desktop look at micro-ATX form factors instead of the traditional ATX PC boxes. The Shuttle is approximately a 12 inch cube. All aluminium. Liquid cooling (which is now fanless). I have built up 4 of them. As luck would have it, the first (the one I'm sitting with now) uses an Intel P4 Prescott CPU that is the hottest (as in temperature) Intel released before cutting the speed and going multi-core in 2006. The other three Shuttles I built a year later all used AMD Athlons - which were faster and a lot cooler than the Pentium.... and if anyone didn't guess... one reason for starting this thread and asking is the AMD chip faster at ray tracing than the Intel was that in 2006/2007 the answer was in favor of AMD.

Cheers.