Where are you getting the Popcorn Hour from? Looks pretty nice.

lopaka

Brian Weeden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 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

Reply via email to