PC Slaves ?

[scorefrog]

Hey Pros out there,

I've nothing better to do than bothering you with a question form a bloody-PC-Newby. I'd like to purchase 2 PC's to use em as slaves for my Mac (Master). (My basic idea of having to cheeper 8GB Pcs instead of one i7 PC with 16+ GB is based on the experience of pros stating that everything runs smooth while not using more than 12 GB on one machine.) The Alternatives I found:

1) Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q8400, 4× 2667 MHZ / 8 GB RAM for 645 $ (430 €)
2) 3) AMD Athlon II X2 215, 2,7 Ghz / 8 GB RAM for 435 $ (290 €)

my 2 Questions are:

1) Is such an AMD enough to manage 8 GB of samples with acceptable latancy?
2) Or is one i7 PC with 24 GB (DDR3) Ram better with no doubt than 2 cheeper PCs as the above mentioned?

[DARC]

Out of the two 8GB machines the AMD would be better for samples, I would go for a new DDR3 AMD system though. You can not run 24GB on a single i7 PC at the moment due to the lack of 4GB DDR3 unregistered dimms, so 12GB is the limit there. If you want more in a single PC then you need to go with a 5500 series Xeon computer but that isn't going to be that cheap (around £2400)

[scorefrog]

Hey thanks DARC, this is very valid information!

[scorefrog]

I searched for ddr3 AMD's following your recomandation and found that I can get a

1) Phenom 3 Ghz with DDR2 RAM or
2) Athlon 2,6 Ghz with DDR3 RAM

for the same price! So which should be the priority in your opinion ? Faster CPU or DDR 3 RAM?