Inventor laptop - Quad core vs Dual Core

[james 172]

Hi all

Due to start a new role next month and in the interim, have been asked to specify my own hardware.
I thought this would be great fun but it's giving me some unforseen headaches!
My main dilemma is do I go for a higher Ghz dual core or a slower speed quad core?
I've read that for standard modelling Inventor only uses 1 core which makes the other 3 effectivley redundant, so I am assuming it would be more benificial to spec the higher speed dual core???
For the record i'm looking at the Dell Precision M4600 laptop range.
Can anybody advise please?

[BlackBox]

I do not use Inventor, so for what it's worth....

We recently upgraded our hardware to Dell Precision M6600's which came with (Quad) Core i7 processors which had a slightly slower clock speed than the processors in our former computers, Dell Precision M4500 with (Dual)Core i7 processors. Both platforms ran Windows 7 64-Bit... Much to my surprise, the M6600, despite the slightly slower clock speed, is in deed faster running the same AutoCAD applications.

HTH

[Pablo Ferral]

The general advice is that Inventor only uses multi-threading for Rendering and simulation. So if you are doing rendering or simulation go for more cores - other wise go for a faster clock speed...

[f700es]

Yeah but clock-speed it not really a true indicator of a CPU's performance. Remember when the Core2 Duos came out with slower clock speeds than the P4s that they replaced? Better performance came from the C2D chips. Same with today's CPUs. A 2nd gen Ivy Bridge i7 will/should be "faster" than a higher clocked 1st gen i7. Just make sure you are comparing similar chips.
Example: Over at cpubenchmark.net a 2.93GHz Core i7 875k scored 6,258 on the CPU test. A newer and slower Core i7 2920XM @ 2.5GHz scored 7,475. It does seem that the 3rd gen i7's do have higher clock speeds than the older ones but just make sure it is a newer generation. Just do your homework

[james 172]

Just as an update I ended up going for the quad core in a Dell Precision M4600.
Should turn up some time this week, i'll update how I get on with it.
Thanks for all the help.