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Huh? 2 HDs with different size - is that a new trend?

Just from a look at the prices, I'd spend those few extra bucks for the second core. I mean, really, at that price it doesn't matter anymore?

Of course the performance gain will depend on the way you use your computer. Most current games, for ex., will probably not benefit _that_ much from the second core. But consider that the single-core athlon runs at 2.4 GHz, while the X2 is clocked to 2.0 GHz, so for pure single-tasking you *might* notice missing processing power with the X2. So you might want to check some benchmarks.

If you don't do games, and use it mainly for video encoding (with SMP-optimized software), building software, or everyday (multitasked) work, you'd probably be better off with the X2, IMO.

cheers Joe

Dual Core basically means 2 CPUs on the one chip, since there are 2 CPUs you won't get lagged down very often (one CPU handles the CPU intensive task whilst the other does nothing except handle user interaction so that you can continue to use the computer without it feeling slow). Current trends are drifting to multiprocessing so you may as well get that if you're willing to pay for it.

I don't remember what the processing power calculation is but I think it's something like 2 CPUs of the same speed gives 150% of the overall performance of a single core. The AMD Dual Cores are meant to have some sort of bottleneck reduction (HyperTransport and integrated memory controller) which may actually make it closer to 200%.

The lower clock speed on the chips will reduce individual app performance though, however most Windows stuff often has more than 1 thread (A couple of the system services have 50+ threads). Basically individual programs will be comparitively slower (unless SMP-optimized, ie. has more than 1 thread) but it should feel smoother and less jerky under load.

Cool. BTW, I have two different size hard drives so I can have the first one (120 GB) for Windows and programs, + 20-40GB for a Linux partition, and the 250GB drive for videos and files and stuff.

Thanks for the advice,

-Stephen