I recently upgraded to a Dell Precision PWS 690: 4 dual core, 64 bits Xeon processors running at 2.33GHz, 8GB for RAM , tons of disk space. nVidia Quadro FX 3500.
My old workstation was a Dell Precision 530: 2 Xeon processor (single core), 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 6800 GT.
I thought I was going to be blown away by the performance of the new workstation, both at CPU level and display level. Unless I am not doing something right, I have seen very little improvement on the CPU side and only some, but seems moderate, on the display side. I have not run any type of performance test to find out exactly, but I am extremely disappointed. In fact, if anyone has any idea regarding this, I would appreciated any input.

What’s your OS?  You’ve got a pretty screamin’ workstation there, but it’s possible that there is just too much to use.  I’d do some testing with various models and render engines, watch Task Manager to see how much of your resources you are actually using.  Eight Gigs of RAM seems a little extreme, unless you are doing some serious multitasking (running Photoshop and Revit with Viz) and four processors is a lot, but when they are dual core you’re talking about eight threads running, which I think is beyond the limit (?). 

Let us know what you find out.

Chris

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

My OS is Windows XP x64. One thing I found out is that my networking card(s) pretty much locks up anything from running when it is actively working - and for certain things it is very slow. One of my problems was the time it took Maya to close: about 1 minute every time. It turns out that, per our company policy, the My Documents folder is on a network server, and Maya uses this folder to store UI settings and preferences. When I forced Maya to use the local disk to store settings, the time to close the application went from 1 minute to less than 20 seconds. We still haven’t had time to figure out why the network card is doing this.
My personal opinion is that 64 bits is a big pain - it has given me more problem than anything else. The 8 working threads are nice, but rendering wise I am limited by Mental Ray 2 threads limit (as per my license). The only really nice thing is the RAM, even though I admit is a little bit of an overkill.

Marco