LHC@home

It depends ... :)

MOST likely, the best initial increase would be a faster processor.

BUt, you will want to upgrade the RAM too, you may be surprised at the difference in speed possible. Also, make sure you are using multi channel for the memory ...

ONE of the nice things in SO Calif is Frys which has regular sales of new processor / MB combos ... many of them are low end, but, they also offer, at times, some pretty sweet higher end sets.

Of course, since I just put about $12,000 into my new Mac Pro I will not be looking there anytime soon ...

Gettting a good MB can also improve speed ...

Alas, getting the balance right is hard ...

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I'm currently running on a 2.8 Ghz Pentium-D with 1Gb of RAM running at 533 Mhz. I have a LITTLE bit of money to play with. Dollar for dollar, would it make a bigger difference to upgrade to faster RAM (max. supported would be 800Mhz), or upgrade to a faster Pentium-D processor (either the 3.4 or 3.6 Ghz model.) I'll do both eventually, but I can't do it at the same time. Simply telling me to upgrade to a Core 2 is NOT HELPFUL. Any info dealing with my question WOULD be helpful and very much appreciated. Thanks!

The limiting factor here is really your motherboard. Try to find out what processors it can support. From these select the one with the most cores (parallel processes) and the highest clock speed. For distributed computing 1GB is in most cases sufficient, unless your motherboard would support a quad core, which i doubt. If not, consider saving a bit longer to aim for a quad core (a Q6600 is not very expensive any more), but will in your case probably require also a new motherboard. Extra RAM is of course always nice, but 1GB good quality RAM as you seem to have, should really do it for most applications and certainly for normal DC.

Best of luck.

Kind regards

Alain

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