Oh, sorry - I just saw that it was using the same Xeons as the Pro, not the Tesla unit was some all-singing super add on.
Only handy if your apps/OS are CUDA capable though?

Yeah. In the same way a Mac's poor graphics don't matter if you're not using them.

Why would you buy a multi core machine to run Word? Most video editors and support CUDA, and that's the kind of thing where you actually need the real super-power.

Video editing doesn't need super-computer cluster ability. Even HD.
SFX effects rendering and the like, I guess fluid/thermo dynamic modelling, those sorts of things might.

It does if you want to render a stupid number of effects in real-time previews. A high-end graphics card is maybe enough for HD, but I imagine cinema quality stuff would need a lot more.

I used to use a 486 so I know it can be done on a lesser machine, but it's so much less painful when you have horsepower. I'm not an expert at this, but I have suffered from 40 hour+ rendering times which is a long way short of "real time".

Right, so SFX rendering rather than video editing (knocking lumps of footage into shape).

Well yes. Adding a few titles and a couple of transitions isn't exactly calling for "high end".

As I've said before, my low-end low-power VIA netbook actually does 90% of what I need. I wouldn't dream of using it to render Star Wars 7 on though.

Personally, I would say that video editing (if you want to render a feature length film with superb quality and CGI and stuff) is probably even more suited to supercomputing/render farms.

Anyway, IMO the Dell is a better buy in terms of performance - it has a proper GPU. However, it's difficult to directly compare it to the Mac as the Mac can run OS X without any hacking and in the sort of areas these systems would be used, there's no way someone would try and make a hackintosh out of a Dell workstation. Even if they did, the experience wouldn't be the true Apple one.

The majority of video editing isn't rendering CGI. That's a specialist area in a specialist field.
A lot of the work can be done at the telecine stage where the footage is scanned.
Admittedly, it's been a couple of years since I was up close with it, but you ordinarily have an offline system to do meat + potatoes cutting. It may be capable of some basic effects - think of Final Cut, Avid.
Any further effects are sent off to a dedicated system which isn't used to handle massive timelines and lots of footage - it just does the heavy lifting work on the graphical effects.
The whole lot's then recombined during an Online Edit, where the previous edits you made to your footage are re-applied to your original captured footage, sometimes involving lots of tape swapping by someone in an machine control room, but hopefully these days relying more on HD capacity.

Video editing is not the same as visual effects. A good video editor isn't the same as a good Flame artist or Spirit or Millennium Telecine operator.
So, basically, the CGI/effects folk are specialists in a specialist environment. We're not really talking about consumer high-end anymore.

Edit: Good London based firm's website for their VFX dept. - http://www.moving-picture.com/index.php ... 3393&num=7

Thanks JJ you have made my day. It is rare to have someone agree with me.

I wasn't disagreeing with you CC.

Now is extreme better than high-end? (only joking )