Hi,

Years ago I built a dual processor system using two 2ghz Athlon MP chips and a Tyan mb. It was satisfyingly fast.

Later, when it died, I replaced it with a Dell with Dual 2.4ghz Xeon chips, which was a bit slower than the previous system. I thought this might be due to the better performance of the Athlon chips.

Later still, I replaced that with a Dell with a Pentium 4 dual core 3.4ghz chip. This is way slower than the original Athlon system.

Each system had more ram than the previous, the two earlier ones ran winders2000 and the last one xp.

I tend to run two cad system, word, excel, acrobat, firefox, thunderbird, and a couple of other things all the time. Same for all systems, mostly all the same versions.

So, I'm thinking the dual core system is so much slower than the separate chip systems because all the external stuff is shared between the two cores, while the separate chip systems have everything duplicated for the two chips.

Is this a correct assumption?

The reason I'm asking is I'm now looking to replace the latest system, but all the multi processor system now offered are all multi core as well. I'm thinking that if I have four quad core chips, xp will run everything on one chip, and I'll have the same performance hit.

Thanks!