Will all software automatically make use of six cores?
That was my concern with the CPU. I know that bleeding-edge usually costs $$ and getting something a bit under that is usually the best value. I just wasn't sure if it wouldn't be worth the premium in this case.
I thought that since that Quadro card had the CUDA technology, it would speed things up. Adobe is saying either of the two cards are certified with their Mercury rendering engine, being touted as providing much more real time with Production Premium Suite CS5 coming out next month or so.
For the most part software which supports multiple threads (anything new and CPU heavy) will count the cores and launch an equal number of threads. Although there were a couple of poorly designed programs which expected the core count to be a multiple of 2, but since AMD and now Intel have 6-core CPUs out, those programs have been fixed.
The only time it's worth paying the premium for the faster CPU is if you're going to make more than the difference back by finishing early.
All recent Nvidia cards support CUDA. Anything from the 8800GT 512 up has excellent CUDA support. The Quadro cards are just Geforce cards with a different name slapped on them, and their price quadrupled because some CAD software used to only certify that line.
While the CUDA acceleration helped some, it's nothing like the speed up gained from the Spurs. Of course the software you're using has to be able to make use of the hardware you have. TMPGEnc uses all 8 CPU cores I have, the CUDA of my 8800GT 512, and the SpursEngine. I get about 5x realtime when encoding video (H.264 1080p24 input being transcoded to MPEG2 3:2 pulldown 480i60), so a 50 minute clip takes 10 minutes to encode. Without the Spurs I was seeing about 1.25x realtime with just the CUDA filtering. As a test without CUDA I get very close to realtime with just the 8 CPU cores from my dual Quad Opterons.
