2nd CPU?

hollywoodjrc

New Member
Hi everyone,
I currently have a supermicro workstation (http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7525/X6DAE-G2.cfm), with 1 Xeon 2.8GHz 2MB L2 cache, and 1 gig of memory.

What performance increases do you think I would experience if I add a second Xeon to my current setup? Would there be a performance increase in my common apps like Windows Media Player, Dreamweaver, etc.? Or would it not be worth it?

I'm not overly tech savvy - so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks!
 
it'll perform similarly to dual core. you may need more memory because i believe each processor has its own set of memory. then again, i never built a dual cpu system before. lol
i dont believe it will increase performance a whole lot for general media apps... maybe if you convert a lot of audio or video, then it should help.
 
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Thank you for your posts. I really appreciate your insight.

So, in your opinions, if I want better performance on my current apps would it be a better idea if upgraded the Xeon 2.8 to a Xeon 3.2? (the board can handle a 3.6GHz processor or lower, but the 3.6 is roughly $600 and is out of budget).

I guess adding some more memory might help too?


Thanks again!
 
As others have said, its not really worth it for what your doing. However I think upgrading from a 2.8 to a 3.2 would also be a poor decision. If you were debating between doing one of those things, i would go with a second CPU.
 
Honestly...I would go eith neiher, I don't think it would be worth the money for either. Maybe you could try updating another componet How much RAM do you have? Maybe an upgrade on that would be good, or What are the specs on your harddrive? You could upgrade that(not just in size, but speed)
 
Thanks for your responses - sorry for the delay, as I was out of town for a week.

The specs for my computer are:

Motherboard: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7525/X6DAE-G2.cfm
CPU 1: 2.8GHz Xeon, 2MB L2 Cache
Memory: 1024MB PC-3200 DDR2 400MHz
Hard Drive: Western Digital 160GB http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=137 (supports SATA 300 MB/s, however, my motherboard only supports 150 MB/s)
Video Card: PNY VCG6600GXPB Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card (I bought this because it was the only reasonably priced dual card at the time that supported the PCI Express x16)

I guess there are a couple of things that I may be able to do. I could (1) add more memory, or (2) buy the 300MB/s SATA PCI adapter and maybe that could speed things up a bit. The only thing I have against doing that is when Windows Vista comes out, I was hoping to use the integrated RAID in the motherboard for some redundancy. I didn't setup the mirroring when I built the computer originally so I have to wait until I reinstall Windows.

Does that seem reasonable? I guess I have to realize that programs like Dreamweaver and some of the other stuff I run are pretty clunky and some of the upgrades I’ve realized won’t make any difference, as you guys have mentioned.
 
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