Currently running: Peniutm 4 CPU 3.0MHZ, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD with VISTA 64

looking to upgrade to 1TB internal HD, addtl DVD R bay and was wondering if the processor would make a difference.

What do you do with it?

rip and burn movies/music/family pics/family camcorder...at any given time, I have approx 5-6 windown open..

2 of those windows are FT !!!

If it fits the CPU socket, a slower Core2Duo or Core2Quad would be good for the multitasking. The latter may be a bit of an overkill. I do what you do (and more) with a E6300 Core2Duo (1.86 GHz) and the system is rarely at 100%.

thanks

rip and burn stuff will definitely do better with a multi-core processor. This is getting over my head, but aren't more programs trying to dump more graphics-intensive stuff onto graphics cards? If you're just ripping and burning its no big deal, but if your converting video files see how your GPU stacks up. Lastly, don't overlook your HD speed. If you are really nit-picking speed than certainly stay away from 5400rpm HDs. 7200rpm is pretty standard, but you can also find 10,000rpm for a price. Not sure how much of a difference that will make. I'm a bit out of my league there as well.

I'm not entirely sure this is true, as I don't know of any of those tools that are written these days for multi-processor support.

If the apps are threaded, though, wouldn't the scheduler handle the chores of distributing the threads among the cores without the app specifically having to be written for multiple processors? Of course, single-threaded apps will see no substantial benefit, but could see a little speed up if other processes were being run on an alternate core.

Cheers.

Many applications written in the days of single core CPU's may be multi-threaded so that they have a UI handling thread, a disk I/O thread, a compute thread, etc. This makes them more responsive. However, unless the application writer anticipated running on a system with multiple cores, they probably would not have written their application to create multiple compute threads, which is where you would see significant benefits running that application on a system with multiple CPU cores.

When you are running a bunch of stuff an extra core or two helps no matter how the apps are written.

The speed of your CPU can make quite a lot of difference when you are converting/transcoding video. As far as I know, the graphics card/GPU plays little part in recoding/converting video performance, it is all about raw CPU power.

www.tomshardware.com has benchmarks comparing different processors for different applications.

They show a that computer with a Core 2 duo E8400 will typically convert/transcode video anything between 1.5x to 2x times faster than a computer with Pentium 4 3mhz processor (D830). It makes a lot less difference to some other applications though.

Also, a dual core processor generally makes the whole computer much more responsive when you are multi-tasking, especially if you are running processor intensive applications in the background.