This is probably a dumb question but I'm way out of my depth at this level of PC technology and am hoping for a little guidance... I have an opportunity to (hopefully) upgrade my aging HP/Compaq DC7600 Minitower with a slightly less outdated Dell XPS 420 and I'm wondering if the Dell will have significantly better performance than the old Compaq. I can't go much newer than the Dell, I don't think, because I need to stay with full-size PCI slots for the time being. My Compaq has a dual core Pentium 4 running at 3.4Ghz and the Dell I'm thinking of getting has an Intel Core 2 quad processor running at 2.66Ghz. I guess my concern is that the Compaq's CPU 3.4 Mhz clock speed looks quite a bit faster than the Dell's 2.66Mhz processor... but the Dell has 4 cores where the Compaq has two. My main performance bottleneck at present is multi-track audio recording and processing... pretty processor-intensive stuff and since the Dell seems optimized for gaming, I'm hoping the same sort of processing optimization will help with my audio processing bottleneck. Thoughts, anyone?
How much ram are you using on both PC's ? Have you put the two through some tests ?Like start up, shut down and page loading ... My Opinion is the Quad cores are slower than the dual core, But This is just my opinion...
I don't have the quad core available for testing so I'm not able to compare the two machines. My dual core is only running 1GB of RAM and I imagine bumping that up to the PC's max of 4GB would help quite a bit, but the quad I'm considering already has 4GB and that's part of the cost/benefit equation. It'd cost me $70 to replace the 4 256mb DIMMs in my current PC so if I deduct that $70 from the cost of the Dell XPS 420, that leaves me paying only $170 for the Dell. I guess I'll go ahead and pick up the Dell and see how it does. My recording software supports multi-core processors so with any luck, I'll see some benefit there. If not, I can always sell it or keep it as a spare.
