proper hardware for digital painting

[Dasein]

Hello everyone. First time here.

I am working as a freelance illustrator and I am about to do a total upgrade in hardware so I was checking out the new crop of Mac pros. There is the choice of a quad core (2.66G or 2.93G) and the 8-core (2.26G, 2.66G, 2.93G)

I can afford the 8-core (2.26G)with some memory boost or the quad core (2.93) with the additional memory. Actually the price turns out to be almost identical.

Considering that my ONLY use is actually drawing. (currently using an intuos3 with photoshop cs2 and painter X but planning to buy cs4 soon) is there any reason to pick one over the other?

In other words for such a specific oriented task, does anyone know if less cores with higher clock speeds, is better or worst than lower clock speed with twice the cores? which setup favors best the brush engines for our two most beloved progs in the world? :)


Thanx!

[Parka81]

Just get the cheapest current Mac Pro you can find. They are all very powerful, I'm using one myself, the 2006 quad 3ghz version which is still super fast after 2 years.

It's going to last you many years.

Actually for your needs, you can also look at the iMac. But I hate the glosy screen.

Hardware today is way more powerful than normal software requirements. Digital painting doesn't require that much processing power anyway.

[Dasein]

That's a solid opinion, with which, to be honest, I tend to agree, although the answer to this question still interests me, for the sake of knowledge if not anything else. IS there a difference?

(Since the vast majority of my work ends up printed in offset, using at least a fairly decent prepress monitor is kind of essential, so I really don't consider an imac as an option)