Is it worth Going Dual?

A

Aztlan

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 3, 2002
Messages
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My brother has the current system
Intel P4 3.4C
2 gig of pc 3200 value corsair ram
the motherboard is a Asus P4PS800D-E

He is mainly using Cinema 4D and as you might know uses hyperthreading

so my question is, what type of dual processor is best/ price performance ratio?
or is it not worth it?

I was considering Opteron but since it doesnt support HT, I am not sure anymore

thanks
 
since he is using Cinema 4d a very smp friendly program, i would defently go with a dual, and duals are not all the expenisve anymore,

you could build a monster opti 246 based system that should be almost twice as fast as the 3.4 in cinema 4d and alot other smp aware programs for around 1800 usd (but thats for everything mb/cpus/raid hd setup (sata)/videocard/dvd burner/1gig ram(reg ecc needed).

for about the same you could build a very nice dual 800fsb xeon with the 3.2ghz chips (every thing else will move over) and have 2 of the fastest xeons on the market with 64bit support and massive cache and HT!.

I would go with the xeon options, simply becuse you can build a system that will be almost as fast as his curent machine, but with a second cpu! on programs that do not support SMP, he will not notice any real slowdown (or he loses 200mhz and some overhead from reg ecc ram) but he will not notice a massive slowdown when playing a game, while encoding, while surfing the web, while hosting the game, all on one machine! and if the programs are truly SMP aware like Cinema 4d is, he will notice a massive power boost :D

the problem with SMP is just like broadband, one you have it, you cant go back :D SMP FOR LIFE!
 
yes that is the cpu i was talking about, if cash is a problem, get him just one cpu and this moitherboard, and you can upgrade to a second cpu later. you could also put in 2 hd's and setup this up as raid, for a boost in most applications that require HD read/rights. Hope this helps, i know my dual 2.0ghz xeon (either one) out folds (F@H for team3074) and will out divix encode my single p4 (ht enabled) 3.0ghz by around 15-35%. you have to ask how important is his time.
 
the asus ncch is a great board (from what i can see) but it is harder then all get out to find in the us, but the iwill 800 is easy to find. and i dont know what the price on the asus will be, and as you can see by my sig, i have nothing against asus. the ncch should be a great board. the only draw back on the ncch is that it does not have any agp slots, but you can get verry nice pci video, and it does have 2 pci-x slots so you can get great video with 2 pci-x cards.
 
ive just finish reading a lot about the ncch over at 2cpu forums, and it seems to be a great board, to OC also

are you sure that brown port on the top is a AGP pro?
 
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