On Thu, 9 Apr 2009 09:41:22 -0700 (PDT), muzician21
wrote:

Right now I'm running a 2.4 gig P4 on a Soyo Dragon mobo. I could
upgrade to a socket 478 3.4gig processor and get about a 30% bump in
speed which wouldn't be bad, but it's my understanding going to a Core
2 Duo chip I could see a much bigger increase.

It's not worthwhile to upgrade the CPU, unless you found one
quite cheap which the highest speed CPUs per socket
generally aren't. Long term it would become worse and worse
relative to multi-core CPU performance, as more and more
apps become better multi-threaded and you find new things to
concurrently do without bogging the machine down once you
have more cores to throw at jobs.



I dont need to be on the cutting edge, what Core 2 chips should I look
for that would net me about 3x the speed of that 2.4gig P4? I'm
favoring Intel unless you feel there's a really compelling reason to
go with someone else. .

As always, budget should be considered vs length of time
till the next upgrade/replacement. That'll guide you to
what CPU you choose, which Core 2 Quad model #.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...name=Quad-Core


I still want to run XP - all my software works with it and I'd like to
stay with PCI slots, not PCI express so I can swap over hardware I've
already got. The more PCI slots the better - like 5 or more. Does such
an animal exist - i.e. Core 2 duo system with lots of PCI slots?

Thanks for all input

Life will be easier if you can accept only 4 PCI slots.
Here are a few of those,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...lue=735%3A7583

I'd stay away from anything with a Via chipset, historically
their PCI implementation has been inferior to Intel's.