Upgrade a 2.40 Core 2 to a Quad??
 

I use PPro and sometimes another Adpbe app at the same time. Would upgrading to a low-mid range Quad make much of a difference performance wise?

(I have 3gigs of 667mhz RAM)

I upgraded from my 2.4Ghz Duo to the 2.4Ghz Q6600 Quad core about two months ago and the move was definitely worth it. I'm running 6Gb of RAM, RAID-0 for footage, render time has improved a great deal.

One thing you might not be thinking about is power, my Q6600 was not running as well as it should have and after some research I realised my entire system was grossly under powered so I had to buy a 750W power supply.

Useful link: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

See:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=119195

Since you have DDR2 667 memory I'd guess you'll have to buy:

1. New Motherboard
2. CPU, Q9450 or better
3. Possibly new memory(or go for the DQ6 DDR2 MB as I did)

The gain in render speed is huge(mpeg2/HD)

// Lazze

I don't see any reason to toss the motherboard and memory necessarily. A lot of (most) boards that support a Core 2 Duo will support a Core 2 Quad. Q6600 and Q9300 are very viable, lower cost options too.

Robert, I don't agree

1. many modern MB's take the Q6600, but not the new 45nm penryn family
2. Q9300 isn't a good choice for video editining since it sports a cut down SSE4 set + half the cache size - and the lower price doesn't make up for it.

As I said, he CAN reuse his memory if he goes for a DDR2 based MB. 667mhz memory modules are "slow" and he may run into FSB problems when using a modern/faster CPU(that is if he doesn't choose a MB with decoupled frequencis for memory speed and FSB).

// Lazze

- How much is "a great deal"? 5%? 50%? 200%?
- How are you sure that the improvement is not due to your RAID-0 and RAM?
Thanks.

I'm not sure how many boards will not support a Penryn (I haven't done anything like an extensive survey), but I sure have the impression that most being sold nowadays do. Some boards might need a BIOS update. If the OP's board will not support a Penryn, then a Q6600 or Q6700 are certainly viable options. At under $200 nowadays, the Q6600 offers a lot of bang for the buck.

Both the Q9300 and Q9450 support the same SSE4 instruction subset (4.1). The larger cache on a Q9450 doesn't do much at all for video encoding performance (it does help some games run considerably faster though).

Robert,

You're right about SSE 4.1 (I can almost swear that when I checked the docs at Intel before the Q9450 was available here in sweden they had an "*" on the Q9300 on SSE4.1 - anyway its not there now.

The Q6600 may be a more viable option in this case considering MB and "old" memory modules.

// Lz