DELL Editing Workstation?

[Brian Manning]

Im in a similar boat to the OP. Currently sd, 2gb ram, quadro fx 3500 card. Going to buy hd cam and need beefier machine.

What diff is there between the xeon processor and the i7?

Also, I need to know about graphics cards. I use cs4 for premiere and after effects and photoshop. I hear that premiere doesnt support SLI or cuda., so theres no need to get a quadro or gtx 590 for example. Have I heard wrong?

My 3rd question is:

[Scott Chichelli]

in a word nothing.
single Xeons (W3xxx series) are the exact same thing as 900 series desktop. its marketing hype and nothing more. for that matter 5600 series Xeons same thing
only difference is support for ECC ram which you do NOT want in a workstation. (slower)

Compare Intel® Products,

Scott
ADK

[Ed Szarleta]

Compare Intel® Products

Thanks for the link.

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by Scott Chichelli

in a word nothing.
single Xeons (W3xxx series) are the exact same thing as 900 series desktop. its marketing hype and nothing more. for that matter 5600 series Xeons same thing
only difference is support for ECC ram which you do NOT want in a workstation. (slower)

I am sorry to say but that comment about ECC being bad for workstations is not smart at all. When you have a 10 hr, 15 hr or 20 hr render (or even several days for 3D renders), ECC ram is a must in order to cover your a$$. With very long renders, the chance of a read or write bit error goes way up. In addition, 95% of people here only use consumer class drives which means the bit error rate is only 1x10^14 versus 1x10^15 for Enterprise SATA/SAS 7200rpm drives and 1x10^16 for 10k & 15k rpm SAS drives. A single bit error can wreck an entire render and/or corrupt files - I have seen this happen myself.