Will a quad core help?

K

Kuli24

Member
Hey all.
-My dad is wondering if his current cpu (pentium E5800 dual core at 3.2ghz) would benefit from an upgrade to a Q9400S (2.66ghz quad core).

-He does have programs running like dropbox and some streaming service to allow other devices to stream from it.

-The upgrade is free (I have the extra processor already).

-He runs Windows XP 32 bit.

-Just wondering if the higher clocked dual core would be faster than the lower clocked quad core.

Thanks.
 
XP can barely make use of a dual core, so unless he upgrades to Windows 7 and 4GB or more of RAM it will not be of any use.
 
Depends on what you're doing. If he has a distributed workload over lots of threads then you should see an increase.

Otherwise it'd actually be slower in single or lightly threaded workloads.

I'd also ditch XP as it's been EOL/EOS for some time now.
 
I put 4gb ram in there (i guess it's limited to 3.25gb). He's set on keeping the system as is, so xp stays. Maybe go quad core for now in prep for win 7 in the future?
 
beers said:
Out of curiosity what specifically does he need by keeping XP?
Click to expand...
He doesn't want to reinstall windows since he has so many programs and everything is "just so". Given upgrading xp is out of the question, does xp have the capability to say "this core will handle dropbox sync", "this core will handle media stream", etc.?
 
Unfortunately, he'll have to upgrade soon as web browsers will cease to work with the browser since its not longer updated. Staying on XP is just a bad choice all around. Certain antivirus programs don't even support it anymore. He might as well upgrade now so he knows he'll be covered as far as security updates. Even windows 7 supports in January of 2020. I would just get windows 8 or even 10 at this point and just do a fresh install.
 
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