Benefits from Pentium D to C2D to Quad Core

[Windmiller]

I need some advice/info from my fellow collectors about current architecture.We are looking at the benefits and whether there will be any with Quad core's over Core 2 Duo's for our next purchase of 50+ desktops.

A majority of our users run SQL 2005 locally, Office 2007 and our real estate software which is a memory hog. So for SQl 2005, Office 2007 and then typical office use would a quad core provide any benefits over a Core 2 Duo?

[Wizzard1]

Quads are far more expensive- The processor I recommend for the greatest bang:buck ratio would be Intel's brand-spankin new E6300, 2.8GHz/1066. This will give quick response, and the high FSB will help programs gain quick access to the large amount of memory. Make sure and equip it with DDR2-1066!!

OR, for spending *double* the amount on a Q8200, you'll get less single-app performance (non-multithreaded apps) but slighty better performance when the user is doing multiple large applications at once.

But for $80/unit, the E6300 is a fantastically good buy. The quads are just too expensive- Save those for the upgrades.

[kosmokrator]

my answer is:

No!!!

for this purpose u want the machines a cheap c2d do the job!

[gshv]

If the real estate software is only used for data entry then dual-core should be sufficient. If it's used to run a bunch of reports and, possibly, other time and/or memory consuming tasks, which do a lot of database lookups (not just one lookup every few minutes) then, IMO, it's better to go to quad-core - something like Q6600.

Gennadiy

[Windmiller]

[gshv]

I think the SQL 2005 support quad-core processors. SQL 2005 license doesn't care if the processors are single-core, dual-core or quad-core:

http://www.microsoft.com/Sqlserver/2005/en/us/special-considerations.aspx

The important question is - what is the average load is going to be on those PCs? If they run Crystal Reports once a day, and it takes some minutes to run it, then they don't need quad-core CPUs.

Gennadiy