Going to be buying the parts for a new PC next week and I'm pretty psyched as I'm replacing an Athlon system I built 3-4 years ago and have been upgrading piecemeal. So I've got a 3000+ Athlon 64 running on an nForce4 mobo.
After 6 months of research I am still debating over dual core vs quad core. I'm going to continue using my existing video card as it's doing just fine and here's the rest of the parts list: Mobo - Asus P5K-E/WIFI-AP PSU - OCZ Stealthstream 600W RAM - 2x2GB G.Skill DDR2 800 DVD - Samsung SH-S203B Fans - 2x Scythe 120mm So I'm debating between these two CPUs: Q6600 Kentsfield (2.4 Ghz, Quadcore, 65nm) E8400 Wolfsdale (3.0 Ghz, Dualcore, 45nm) They are both within $20 in price so really it comes down to other features. I know that the majority of programs these days don't take advantage of more than 2 cores (except for the multimedia big boys like Photoshop and video encoders). While I will be using the machine for some A/V work, that won't be a common task. More commonly it will be for multitasking several programs at once under Windows XP for work and then gaming. The kicker is that I am getting rid of my HTPC and replacing it with a NAS and the Popcorn Hour settop box. The HTPC used to be my ripping, encoding, burning, and downloading box which was nice because I could offload those intensive (both time and horsepower) tasks to it and not have it slow down my main PC that I use for work and gaming. With it going away, those tasks will now be done on my main PC. I was envisioning perhaps running 2 or 3 VMs at once doing all these various tasks. Anyone see problems with that under XP and the ability for those VMs to use separate CPUs and RAM? Or am I reaching too far and is this something I can't do under XP? I have several work programs that are Windows only (along with games) which are the two reasons I haven't gone to Ubuntu. ---- Brian
