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Need A Bit Of Advice With Regards To An Upgrade?


EnglishRob

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Hi folks,

In the next week or two (most likely just after Christmas) I'm hoping to upgrade my PC to something a bit quicker. At the moment I have an Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754) with 1GB Ram, a 320GB SATA hard drive and a 200GB SATA hard drive. Now I realise that I'm going to have to replace the memory, CPU and motherboard (I'm actually building these into a PC for a work colleague who wants a really cheap upgrade from a P3-800).

Traditionally I've been a fan of AMD chips, although I can't help but notice that the Core 2 chips seem to be doing much better than the Athlon X2 (and Phenom) chips are.

So I've kind of made my mind up on getting an Intel system. I was originally looking at either a Pentium Duo or a Core 2 Duo although due to having a bit extra cash to spend I'm thinking of maybe stumping up for a Core 2 Quad instead.

Thing is, is there any point in going for a quad core CPU?

I use Ubuntu Linux on my PC. My gaming is pretty much emulation based only (or older games like Quake, Doom etc). I want to do a bit of video encoding (home movies from DV to DVD) and other than that it will be mainly web browsing and e-mail and listening to a bit of music.

Would many of the emulators out there benefit from quad core CPU's over dual core?

I guess I'm thinking, would I be better saving the extra cash on a quad core CPU and spend it on maybe a slightly better video card (I was looking at a cheap NVidia or ATI card)?

Rob

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  • 5 weeks later...
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If it was me, and I had the money, I would go quad. Duo is good too, but I would go the one step up so that I could theoretically run 4 progames at once without noticing any sluggishness. I often run multiple programs at once, and a couple of them are usually resource-heavy. So if I could have two cores take care of that while I dick around with Winamp inbetween songs, I'd be happy.

I've never used a quad-core machine, so I do not know if I would actually notice a difference or not. If you have the money to futureproof the system for a long while, go for it. If you want to not spend too much or if this system isn't meant to last years and years, stick with a duo.

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