You can save more money by buying a faster CPU than risking a lockup in the middle of a trade from OCing.
I bought a 2.4GHZ P4 in August 2003 and overclocked it to 3.0GHZ (no additional cooling added). I've never had a problem with it. I'm just amazed that a 3.5 year old computer is still fast enough (I have enormous spreadsheets full of calculations). BTW, in Excel 2000 my spreadsheets were eating up 50% of my CPU. In Excel 2002/XP, it only takes about 15% of my CPU. Excel XP better handles calculations between sheets within a spreadsheet.
I had one of those, and replaced it. Just couldn't handle the dual tasks of monitoring real time data in excel, and keep up with the calcs without being at 100%! My new machine handles it with ease, and plenty of power to spare!
The overclocking argument is irrelevant (except that I wouldn't do it to my trading machine while trading). Tomshardware etc give good examples of overclocking core2duo E6300s to outperform E6800s. So you can overclock. So what? The real issue is that the price point on core2duos (which is apparently a few weeks off getting even better) means that getting a single processor chip for trading is hardly worth thinking about. Multi vs Single thread applications is interesting but still irrelevant - because you run more than one app and the biggest one shouldn't be sharing the same processor with the others (you can change the affinity manually if you want). Simple answer now --- get a core2duo at whatever level you need (one better than you think you need). Other simple answer --- get lots of ram ... why not get 2G or more of matched 800Mhz ram. Final simple answer --- stay with XP Pro ... don't go to Vista
The Task Manager apparently allows you to see the CPU Usage but not by a specific core. Anyone knows how to check how during the elapsing hours how a specific application used the CPU0 and/or the CPU1 (as % of the time), supposing that has not been locked?
30% quicker?! Here is the utility you mentioned: AMD Dual-Core Optimizer - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized. - Can you please describe how those 'optimized' features helped your X2 trading machine?
Come to think of it, since I surf on my trading computer, it seems the web pages load quicker with AMD optimizer. With trading, probably no different. Funny thing though, I have XP Pro SP2 running on it, and it doesn't show 2 graphs for CPU under task manager. But everything appears to be running in dual core. I don't know how to confirm or deny this though?