your me point could be made for the Core 2 of yesterday, yet you made the upgrade to an i5. what's a matter wasn't the Core 2" fast enough
what will you do with the extra cpu capacity besides run simulations? the machine is still bound by the network so you get no advantage on your data feeds
True, very constricted ADSL and the obvious best bang for buck performance enhancer of a leased line is prohibitive. Longer term/maybe immediately, the box could be used to run a (necessarily) 64 bit XL spreadsheet with thousands of data fields, so I am bearing that in mind when thinking what to buy. Forgot to mention that my main PC runs XP 32 and will continue to do so until they invent a one touch program/data migration tool for XP to W764 or until XP becomes unuseable following end of support.
Excel 2010 will make much more effective use of multi-core processors than Excel 2007 does. So 300 bucks for software will probably buy you more than 500 bucks for a new MB
Thanks to all for answers. Clearer now. Think i will go with 2600/z68 for now as using XP32 with sooner than normal upgrade to x79 maybe as and when i get the XL 10 64 stuff coded. One additional point, if I run Win 7 64 bit will this allow me to easily run 3x 32 bit programs at their 32 bit max of 3.2 or 4GB or whatever i.e. will it run better than 3x 32 bit programs competing for the 3.2GB of RAM available under XP or will it be a situation where the benefit i am expecting doesn't exist for some reason.