Quote - Eric: Yes I would be very interested in seeing how you fair with the 8 cores and Carrara...

It came in yesterday and I have a few things to report. Under Carrara 6.03 OSX, it does suffer the core problem. Rendering is awful, but I understand that problem is corrected for the next patch.

Since Vista doesn't have the current multicore problem I did a few performance tests there. Rendering, it's 6.6 times faster than my 2ghz MacBook Pro and 7.8 times faster than my dual 3ghz Xeon.  I tried running the benchmark mentioned on this page forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php and it took 1 minute 24 seconds while there was something installing in the background. This thing is a beast.

Last night I was gaming with some friends on WoW (OSX) and the CPU was sitting at 9-10% utilization.

A few other observations:

it's wicked quiet. I can't hear the fans with it under my desk. Hard drive is pretty noisy (I got the default 320 gig) and it's much louder than the pair of seagates I have in a USB enclosure. The optical drive is horrendous, noisy and flimsy.

I'm not a Hexagon guy so really can't speak to it's performance there.

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins