VCO3, there are people here who don’t even know that much about computers who are telling you you’re an idiot. The people who do know about computers think you’re a retard. The fact that Apple charges a bit of a premium on their configurator is a given, but ancillary to the point. You are comparing apples to oranges and you don’t even seem to be aware of it. After having been asked by virtually everyone here for a comprehensive, itemized list of the components of this unsurpassed $1,000 Windows machine, you went and showed us how you configured a $7,000 Mac and threw it at us suggesting that we’d told you it wasn’t possible. How did you like the taste of those ranch-flavored paint chips that you had for lunch?
For the umpteenth time, what we want to see are the Windows machine specs which are comparable to a $7,000 Mac that you can build for $1,000.
As is unfortunately the case with so many things, “it depends”. The desktop (Kentsfield or Conroe) chips have bigger caches, but the Woodcrest has faster I/O. Even if we call them even, some tasks don’t take well to multiprocessing; some tasks do extremely well. A problem that is very long (has a lot of steps) will probably be easier on the fast dual, while a problem that is short but very wide (doing a few things many times) will be faster on two (relatively) slow duals.
Audiovisual processing tends to be a lot wider than it is long, so, not having benchmarks handy, I’m going to lean towards saying that the two 2GHz dual-cores will have a little bit of an advantage over one 3GHz (ish) dual, or at least be competitive, for these specific tasks.