So many things to like about the Duo. Buy the cheaper 6300-6400 and overclock them. Automatically get a 6600-6700. Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 & E6400: Tremendous Value Through Overclocking
If processor speed isn't usually an issue then what components or "things" are more important? Always been amazed that systems from different manufactures configured with what appears to be the same or very similar processors, memory etc can have great differences in performance when tested by PCWorld or the like. What's the answer?
Pentium D's are rubbish. If you want something cheap then wait for the Core 2 Duo's and Pentium D's will fall in price. But if you want something fast either buy AMD chips or the Core 2 Duo's. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795
Depends on what you're doing. Most users are only interested in office apps with the occassional MP3 burn. That stuff is not really CPU-limited so any mid-priced Dell is more than enough. If the CPU is not the issue, then the hard drive is the next thing. Get a 7200rpm SATA drive with 16mb and you'll see some nice snap. Memory is usually not a concern since most machines now come stock with 1GB.
Intel beating AMD in performance, they actually started innovating, I dont believe it. :eek: I will take much convincing to lift a 5 year old ban on Intel processors in my household. I really do hope its true because we will all benefit if Intel started competing technologically with AMD. Competing technologically as opposed to just using marketing, and blackmailing the large computer manufacturers not to take AMD.
Every dog has its day. Personally I don't care who I buy from, if the manufacturer hits the sweet spot, they've got my money.
Yeah, nowadays with the massive volume of data in Windows and programs that must be read off the disk, the drive's speed is becoming a larger and larger factor in overall performance. Definitely in the graphics and video arena when you're dealing with multi-gig files continuously, drive speed makes a bigger difference than CPU. Many of these machine have RAID for super-fast disk through-put. As a test, I tried out a solid-state disk removed from one of client's web-servers. It wasn't huge, but 5gb was enough to install a clean copy of Windows and all my apps. WOW! On the same machine, Windows-boot times decreased by over 300% and apps loaded instantly! Impossible to see that significant of an increase by going to a faster CPU.
Microsoft and a couple of hardware manufacturers have got you covered. The next big thing for Vista is to boot it from a flash drive. I believe they're gonna incorporate some flash memory onto a regular hard drive. Flash will hold the OS for faster booting. Or something like this. Samsung Flash Drive