Expected Performance Boost? (5050e --> Athlon II X4 620)

[Halon]

On the whole I've been happy with my 5050e, but lately I've wanted to switch my workstation to Linux and run a virtualized instance of XP for the few applications from which I can't quite escape (ArcGIS, I'm looking at you). As the 5050e is somewhat lacking in general horsepower, the A2X4 620 looks like a mighty fine upgrade. Beyond the obvious improvement in load balancing across four cores, what performance improvements can I expect on a per-core basis? I know that the Athlon II series supports SSE 4.x, but is it realistic to expect a decent boost in general performance in everyday applications that aren't multithreaded? Thanks for reading and responding - I've found it difficult to get a straight answer on this point.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

you would see a boost in performance.. 1 the overclockability.. the 5050e is limited to about 3-3.1ghz at best.. the athlon II architecture is much better then the athlon x2 architecture.. but it really comes down to what you plan to do.. if your running a lot of single threaded applications or a lot of multi-threaded applications.. you will also see a better gain in running XP in a VM with the ability to lock it to a single core and still have 3 cores left over to do what ever you want with them.. instead of losing half your processing power like you would with the 5050e..

 

[Halon]

I'm not looking to do any overclocking, but the per-clock performance gain is nice to know about. As you pointed out, even being able to shove XP onto the current equivalent of my 5050e while leaving two cores fully able to perform other tasks would be very nice. Thanks!