S939 A64 X2 4400 .. Worth getting

[VaderDSL]

Hi, I'm 50/50 about replacing my opteron 144 @2.25Ghz with an X2 4400.

For £146 new/retail version is it worth getting? The 939 is dead now so I hear, but will the prices likely drop much more or will they start to creep up as stock becomes rare?

Thinking what I use my PC for, a dual core would be nice. My friend and I have about 250 DVD's between us and are in the process of ripping/compressing them onto our central file server as the DVD's keep getting scratched.

My friend also uses programs such as dreamweaver, photoshop heavily and I rip a lot of music cd's to my PC also. I was thinking these sorts of CPU intensive programs/tasks may benefit from dual core, so that :

1) We could set two instances of a program compressing
2) Or we cold use one core for compressing while keeping the second core to run windows etc.

Any thoughts would be great

 

[squiffy]

DVD Shrink does seem to use dual core, it took 12 minutes to shrink a DVD with core 1 disabled, and 6 minutes with both cores enabled. Both at full priority.

Shrink of a 7.5GB DVD-Video ISO. Set shrink priority , not background mode (100%)

Both cores are at 97-100% constant (taskmanager showing 100% for both) There is a bit of slowdown, but machine is still usable in Windows (forums etc) although wouldn't do any more heavy work

Dual Core
Started 23:22
Finshed 23:28
So 6 minutes.

Set shrink afinity to CPU 0. Core 0 at 100%- task manager is showing 100% for core 0, core 1 is still doing something although around the frist line. Windows is not slowing down, as I have core 1 free.

Single Core
Started 23:29
Finished 23:40
11 minutes!

 

[VaderDSL]

Excellent thank you squiffy

Heading out now

 

[VaderDSL]

Nice, installed and sitting at 2.5Ghz @ 1.45V

 

[darreny]

jeez you dont hang around, 4hrs from asking if theyre any good to getting it up and running

 

[easyrider]

Shrinking a DVD with a 3.8ghz conroe E6600 is some thing to behold.Blows away my opty 170 @ 2.8ghz lol

Dual core for the win lol!