[g__day (Matthew)]

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?