Gnome, I got lucky while combing thru some Dell Outlet Inventory . . . and I just ordered ( last week ) the Vostro 400 from the refurbished Dell Business Outlet and was lucky to get the Intel Core 2-Duo 3.00, E6850 with a 1333 FSB and 4 MB of L2 cache ( Intel Virtualization Technology AND Intel Trusted Execution Technology ), with 2 Gigs of Pc-6400 RAM, an 80 Gig HD, and an 256mb Nvidia 8600 GT graphics card for: $519.00 For $75.00 more, I can purchase a beefy "Silencer-470" power supply unit from PC Power & Cooling. Another $50.00 and I can add 2 more Gigs of RAM. Free shipping too. I'm a happy camper!
Here are some very interesting power consumption comparisons of all of the Duo-Core and Quad-Core processors: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13470/15
Not impressed with C2D performance in my Optiplex running LMT-Expo, excel, bloomberg and automation. CPU running at 70+ with 8GB RAM. I purchased a Dell Precision with the 266MHz quad core Xeon last week.
IMHO you need to find a new tech first. I run 3 Quad Core systems (6700) all overclocked and prefer Win XP Prox x64. You just have to ensure the rest of your hardware and software are compatable with the 64 bit environment but it is WELL worth it.
Of course, none of that software is WORKING TOGETHER. Did you try changing CPU Affinity so that each one is using a different "core" or processor ? That may or may not work well depending on how the various programs are interacting. For best results, each software package needs to be totally rewritten to support multiple cores. All you are buying right now with the newer CPUs is faster clock speed.....few software packages can take advantage of multiple cores at the moment.
I verified with an admin at work that XP Pro SP2 sees all 8 cores on a his dual quad-core system (Xeon X5355's).
Thanks for the explanations, gnome. However, if we are on the move and need to keep track of the trading, then we need a laptop for the same. Which one would be good?
Seeing 8 cores and being able for the software to utilize all of them is a totally different deal all together. The CPU chips are way ahead of the software industry.
XP will support multiple cores but the reality is that the OS is "patched" to support more than 1 core. When XP was designed, it was architected with 1 core in mind. To be able to take advantage of more than 1 core, Microsoft had to essentially hack in the support, so it is definitely not optimized to deal with it. So, the truth is that Microsoft is going to claim that they support quad cores, and they're not going to give much detail into what kind of support they do have, and I can pretty much gaurantee that the reason why they won't explain the support thoroughly is because they don't want you to realize just how ad-hoc the quad core support is. That's the nutshell. Secondly, always take benchmarks with a massive grain of salt. Benchmarks are designed to excercize common instructions. Many times, the tasks are very repetitive. Chip designers are well aware of how the benchmarking works. In fact, they will design certain instructions that they know are common in benchmarking to be as efficient as possible. They are even willing to sacrifice other performance if the architecture only allows for limited logical functionality as long as it incorporates the optimized instructions. Many times, these "optimized" instructions don't really improve real-time performance, but they make the benchmarks look blazing fast. Just some tricks of the trade to let you all in on.