What I have found is that I'm a lot happier with the performance of my machine for much longer if I go dual processor. Back when the p3 600's came out I loaded myself up with a dual p3 550. The cpu's were 365.00 a piece at the time and that was back in September or October. Since then the price has fallen to around 225.00. A significant drop but they still retain a large portion of their original value.
So after that upgrade from my previous system of dual p2 300's, SMP equivelant of 600MHz, I now have a system that is actually double the speed in SMP enabled applications if you take into consideration the Katmai instructions that the system now utilizes.
To date there isn't any single x86 processor that can take it. Even the fabled 1GHz processors remain just that, fabled. No one has seen one yet and even if they had it would cost well over 1000.00 just for one of them.
Now you are saying "But that's just it, there aren't very many SMP apps and nothing else will take advantage of it." Well you are right and wrong at the same time. W2k and NT both on a 2 cpu system distributes the processes so as to even out the load and not overstress a single cpu. While running games that normally would stress a single cpu, my system will allow the game to use up to 50% of each processor. And that leaves the other 50% to take care of things like the OS or anything else that comes up. That translates into a the games using a processor of their very own, so with the latest w2k drivers I DO get a better frame rate than someone on a single 550MHz machine. That also gives me the ability to do true multitasking and never have a pause when switching between apps. I can run anything at the same time as any other thing. For example, I usually run Seti in the background and it is always processing SMP, but it backs off when other things want the cpu. So I usually complete a packet in 8.5 hours. At the same time I can burn a cd (scsi 6x burner), and play q3 online, with photoshop open in the background, and 3dstudio max minimized. I will see a performance hit doing all this, true. But my burn won't coaster, my projects won't crash, I will find alien intelligence before you and I will still frag your ass with a rail gun.
Specs:
Tyan Tiger 100 (Upgradable to Dual 850's & 1GB of RAM)
256MB RAM (512 if I need to snag it from another machine)
GeForce DDR 256 (Primary monitor 19")
Millenium II 4MB (Secondary 17")
Apaptec 2940UW Scsi Interface (10k 4GB OS drive - 6x4x16x CD-RW)
Promise Fastrak66 Ultra ATA/66 Raid (2* Maxtor 27.2GB Striped for RAID-0 50GB Total)
OnBoard UDMA (6GB games drive - 10x DVD-ROM)
Intel 10/100 NIC (Connected to HUB and going out to DSL 768k/128k connection)
SB Live! Value (Four Point Surround with Sub)
You may spend a little more $$ building a system like this but it's infinately upgradable. So whenever I decide that this machine isn't fast enough, I will replace the component that is lacking until the entire system has been replaced and I will rebuild this exhisting one at that time into a new fileserver/network renderer.
That's my advice.
