$500 - alot of HDD heartache and I'm quad core fast - and it screams!

[g__day]

Well I took the plunge and migrated from a dual core Conroe2 to quad core E6600 Go version - necessiating a new motherboard, CPU, HSF and a PCI IDE connector card (new motherboards only come with only 1 IDE controller - tough luck if you have 2 IDE drives and 2 DVDs)!

The RAID set up borked eventually 6 hard drives - groan and a terabyte of data. But at the almost recovered stage there is upside.

Photoshop CS2 screams now - its speed bump is significant to say the least - I'll do the benhcmarks soon.

I tried loading the biggest, most demanding game I own (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) whilst doing a virus scan and copying 200 GB of data to my PC. Perfomance was silk smooth - and I mean silky running the game at a 1900 * 1200 with anti-aliasing on!

I must say if you can avoid the pain of data loss I suffered, then these platforms can really stand to make a difference in processing time. For a well written application (re-entrant code using queues) its like I'm siting on a 10 GHz cpu which costs under $300.

Many folk here considered quad core yet?

[sejanus]

i have had a dual dual core xeon 5150 setup (with 16gb ram) for nearly a year :p the macpro, cost a bloody lot of dough though!

[Kal]

I'd love a quad core, but I'm an AMD man at heart (currently got a dual core AMD) and sadly intel definately has the edge now *sniff*. Guess I'll wait until AMD catches up

If you want a game to test the new setup try the Crysis demo, apparently they say that quad core CPU's give a real benefit to the game.

[Lee]

I have to ask - how did you have the 6-drive RAID array set-up so that one drive took the lot down?
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the exercise.....:shrug:

[programmer]

I think you mean Q6600.
Sounds good, although as another poster said, Crysis is the new benchmark, although it's more GPU than CPU dependant. Also CPU won't help with anti-aliasing as inferred above.. it's all down to the video card. Which card do you have?

Not sure what you mean here, but sounds like you're enjoying your new CPU ;)

Yes, I bought my C2D E6600 some months back (along with just about everything else, including 8800GTX video card) with a view to going Quad core when games like BioShock and Crysis came out. BioShock runs like a dream anyway, but Crysis could probably use the extra cores (although not as much as you might think.. mainly during lots of physics computations). A dedicated physics card might make more sense though :D

But if you're into intensive non-gaming applications such as photoshop, then more cores is good.

[g__day]

Well the 6 hard drives where really 3 lots of 2. Moved first RAID array into new case - lost the stripe so lost the array. Second set appear fine but 3 hours in a 800GB HDD striped array just died after being loaded significantly. Annoying the two IDE drives connected to a PCI bridge seemed to just be overwritten - rather than simply present them it went into well there's a RAID array - disks blow - ugh!

Opps I meant Q6600 Go - yes :)

Video card on my main rig is a simple 320 MB 8800 GTS pre-overclocked (I've been into video 3d since it first came out 1997 Stealth 3d 2000 and prior to that 2D accelerators on ever bus imaginable, repeat I've had over 40 3d cards - almost every single 3d card invented at some point it seems). In fact apart from the 80186 - which most texts show didn't much exist - I've had every INTEL, AMD or Motorola processor since the 8086 in 1982 (back when if you wanted a program your wrote it yourself under CPM or DOS 1, and PC's had turbo buttons)!

The point of all this is now basically NVidia's high end 3d cards are so fast now its silly - I ran the old Aquanox test and it hits close to 300 fps, Half-life 2 doesn't tax it, FEAR it eats - basically this system simply doesn't slow down. I just wish the GPGPU forum coded an add-on so that photoshop could be load balanced on my GPU too!

It has taken almost 25 years - (and 30+ K) but mid range PCs are fast enough for me nowadays