CPU usage question for people who know their shit

1. 2019-04-30 at 1:45 AM UTC

   #1
   Phantasmagoria African Astronaut
   For video rendering and making 7zip archives (I'm going to be doing both a lot) would it be better to have a single PC with a 3.2Ghz 6 core i7 processor, or would it be better to have a mac mini with an i3 in the background as the render server and then use a dual core i5 (the standard imac) for making music and programming.
   I have heard recently about thermal throttling and I'm not exactly sure what that is, but I have my assumptions.
   So lets say I am running a 3.2ghz i7 with six cores and I'm rendering a video at the moment, the fan is running and the computer is being put to the task, would that CPU be fine for other use or would it make more sense to have a separate computer for rendering.
2. 2019-04-30 at 8:30 AM UTC

   #2
   

   Lanny Bird of Courage
   A single more powerful processor would definitely be better. You're not going to be exploiting parallelism between the two machines and especially for CPU bound tasks, OS level time sharing is pretty good so you don't really get anything out of isolation besides overhead.
3. 2019-04-30 at 8:47 AM UTC

   #3
   Phantasmagoria African Astronaut

   Originally posted by Lanny A single more powerful processor would definitely be better. You're not going to be exploiting parallelism between the two machines and especially for CPU bound tasks, OS level time sharing is pretty good so you don't really get anything out of isolation besides overhead.

   
   I had an i7 before (I built a desktop back in 2013 before I became homeless) and while I noticed a major improvement in performance over anything I had used before I did notice that it still slowed down while rendering video files.
   
   My idea was that even if the iMac with the dual core i5 is technically underpowered by today's standards, the overall experience would be perceivably better than an i7 because the Mac mini would be doing all the heavy lifting in the background.