Is it time I upgraded cpu?

[Secret_Window]

I'm struggling atm in video editing, with rendering process taking as long as an hour to 2hrs in most cases. Also I'm noticing in benchmarks some of the older athlon x2's are not far behind my core 2 duo.

So do you think it's time I upgraded to something with a bit more kick in it?

Please bare in my mind, I'm not really interested in overclocking.

Budget £200

Current cpu: Core 2 duo E6400 @ 2.13Ghz

cheers

 

[Cob]

A quad-core will only be better if your software can take advantage of the extra two cores.

If it can then it will certainly help. But you will find yourself at only 50% CPU usage if it can't.

 

[DavidB]

Think most video editing programs are quad enabled now, so id say yes definately a good idea. Can i ask why your not intrested in overclocking ? Could get a fair bit more performance out of that chip, and whats to lose ?

 

[Cob]

More memory may help too.

 

[theforce]

No idea what amount of memory he is using at the moment. I would do a little research if you program actually supports a quad-core. If so i would get a Q6600. Even at stock speeds it should be much faster that your dual-core u are using now. Overclocking is not as hard as it sounds. You could try a decent overclock at 3Ghz and no more that should get you a performance increase and make you get to know more about overclocking in general

 

[Secret_Window]

My cpu gets really hot when I overclock it even though it has a Artic cooling Freezer 7 fan on it. My case isn't really upto it (not very good air flow). So I haven't bothered to go back to the point where my computer was literally beeping because it was getting cooked - this was only a a 100mhz overclock btw.

So I want to be on the safe side rather than the sorry side

Btw I have 2GB of ram and use adobe premiere pro for editing.