XP Pro & E8400 vs. Q9450

[Savage1701]

Just wondering, will I see much improvement with a quad core vs. a dual core under the following situation: I do not game. I rarely encode A/V. I do primarily business apps, backup utility, defrag utility, spyware utility. I realize these are not the sort of apps that have a huge benefit from a quad core, but as I understand it, Win XP Pro does recognize 4 cores.

Will I see enough of an overall speed boost from OS running under 4 cores vs. 2 cores to justify the 9450? Or will that be negligible? My system has 4 GB of DDR2 800 speed RAM.

I would add that I already run SuperSpeed RAM caches on my drives and that my pagefile and IE 7 temp files are offloaded to a 4GB GigaByte i-Ram RAM disk. I am currently running the E8400 but can swap that to another CPU if the 9450 is justified. Needless to say, the SuperSpeed caches and i-RAM pagefile disk make a huge difference. I have also set the registry to keep core XP services in RAM, though I doubt that matters a whole lot since the pagefile is in RAM as well.

Anyway, any thoughts would be appreciated. Short of going to 64-bit OS, which I would rather not, I can't up my RAM anymore.

Bottom line question is, does XP Pro benefit enough from the 2 extra cores to make a difference?

Thanks for any help. I will post this in the CPU thread as well, not sure where it really belongs. Thanks.

 

[nobardin]

I do not game. I rarely encode A/V. I do primarily business apps, backup utility, defrag utility, spyware utility.

Given that information, In my opinion what you have is just fine. I would not worry about it.

If you wanted to you could upgrade. However, the stuff you are running wouldn't benefit all that much from the upgrade. You may notice a performance boost, but would it justify the upgrade...In my opinion, No it wouldn't.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

Just wondering, will I see much improvement with a quad core vs. a dual core under the following situation: I do not game. I rarely encode A/V. I do primarily business apps, backup utility, defrag utility, spyware utility

I echo nobardin's statement. IMO, you'd be better off getting faster HDDs instead, since that will provide a much more noticeable performance boost compared to a CPU upgrade.

 

[Savage1701]

Thanks to both of you for your time. That is what I suspected. Believe it or not, some of the trading platforms I run do better on a single-core EE P4 than on the newer duals and quads. And I certainly agree with you on the hard drive issue. I may look to adding another Raptor in RAID, although the SuperSpeed cache utility has made a huge difference, as has paging to an i-RAM drive. And sadly, I can't go to 64-bit XP without breaking tons of apps, or I would and increase the RAM as well. Thanks again.

 

[LNCPapa]

I'm really very curious to know what you're running that requires that much I/O performance? This is purely out of curiosity - nothing else.

 

[Savage1701]

LNCPapa - Well, actually, not to be a smart-a**, but the answer is in your question - I've reached the limits of RAM for a 32-bit operating system (although I still can't figure out why my 3 computers report 3 different amounts of RAM even though they all have 4GB...), I can't cache the hard drives any further, it's diminishing returns to spend $1400 on a processor that offers incremental improvements over a $200-$350 one, and I've maxed the pagefiles to RAM disks precisely to get the highest random I/O and lowest latency possible since nothing I use gives a you-know-what about anything more than 2 cores, with the exception of the OS, and that was my original question. I need fast, stable platforms for my business and trading apps. I don't care about 3-trillion-polygon-per-planck-time video cards to play a video game. I want fast computers, I want a fast ISP, and I want, someday, 10Gbps ethernet. I just want it now, and I will design or cobble together anything that gets me there faster.

 

[LNCPapa]

LOL - sounds like a perfectly legit answer - not sounding like a wiseguy or anything. Maybe one day they'll port your applications over to function properly in a 64-bit environment.