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From: Dave on 8 Jul 2008 16:44
In article <20080624235413.83d32d57.noway(a)nohow.not>, noway(a)nohow.not
says...
> Will it increase performance? Probably. However, I have to be careful
> in answering that to the affirmative. I'm still betting that you won't
> "notice" a difference. And, I'd be willing to bet that even tom of
> tomshardware would advise against this upgrade.

Okay, here is my report...

I re-installed XP 32-bit on the sytem and started doing some tests.

As you suggested, most applications show next to NO performance
increasses of any kind. In the case of Adobe After Effects 7.0 Pro, it
actually renders about 2% slower than my old system.

Because I doubled my memory to 2GB, the OS itself is a bit more
responsive.

However, I re-rendered several projects on the new system using Cinema
4D, 3D Studio Max and Adobe After Effects CS3. Since all of these
applications directly support multiple cores I got a 195% speed increase
from these applications (which are what I use to make a living).

That means a 6 hour render on my old system takes a few minutes over 3
hours now. THAT, all by itself, has made me more productive in my work
and was worth the effort.

So, if someone else is contemplating a similar upgrade and they are NOT
using software which is multi-core/multi-CPU aware then I would agree
with you that the upgrade would not be worth it. However, in my case,
it was WELL worth it and I have profited from the upgrade already.

I have budgeted for a processor upgrade in September after my daughter
goes back to school, so things should only get better. What is most
important to me is that the motherboard I chose is extremely flexible
and very upgradeable.
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