Thread: PC upgrade: Processor query

What're you going to be doing with this PC? That's probably what will determine what you should buy. That and your budget.

Easiest way to think of dual and quad core CPUs is that a dual core is like having 2 CPUs jammed into the one hunk of silicon, and a quad is like 4 CPUs jammed into one hunk of silicon. 4 CPUs can do 4 times as much work as 2 so they don't need to run as fast. That's a pretty simplistic explanation but it's good enough.

What operating system and application(s) are you needing to run?

Some applications love multiple processors and are multi-threaded to take advantage of the quad CPUs. For example, SQL Server can use 1 cpu to index, 1 to search, 1 to process disk requests, etc all at the same time.

Other applications will only use 1 cpu no matter how busy they are. I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that things like your web browser, or Word are not multi-threaded, so would not benefit from having multiple processors.

Anyway - more is always better!! So get a Quad if you can afford it.

Also, get as much RAM as you can afford. I have seen slower CPU computers run much faster than higher MHz CPU computers because they have a bunch of available RAM. If you get the 64 bit version of Windows, you can reference much more RAM than the 32-Bit versions.

HTH

Thanks boys.

Its just the home PC.

A bit of gaming, web browsing, excel work and the unknown element of my girlfriend running her uni programs which are apparently very system demanding. One from memory is autocad.

So I'm looking at:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.3 Mhz and 4000 Ram?

Thanks again, info was helpful