Coola said:
just basically web surfing, lots and lots and LOTS of multitasking, minor (very minor) video editing, photoshop, flash mx stuff like that.
Multitasking is one thing, SMP/Dual-Core is targetted at "compute intensive" multitasking. While it may make most things feel slightly smoother, it's really aimed at situations where one of your tasks requires 100% CPU usage. I am sure that if you run Photoshop and Flash MX (web design?) concurrently, you will see some benefit, but even this is more on the luxury-fringe of what SMP is
really needed for.
Whatever you do, get lots of RAM. That helps even single core CPUs get multiple jobs done without too much hitching. Perhaps this would be a good reason to save $150 on the CPU and spend it on more memory.
I just wanted to know if it was worth the money to put into it. Will 200mhz really make that big of a difference for the price?
Well, it's a pretty bad deal if you are looking at single threaded performance $150/200MHz, but you need to double that MHz number when considering multi-threaded apps.
I've decided that I'll be aiming to get a Dell Dimension 9100, though concerned about purchasing it now and then the next version of windows pops out. So i'm trying to build a system *now* that can run longhorn and other apps down the road.
Perhaps you would be better served by waiting for the next Windows release before buying a new rig. This would also give you time to save up extra cash to really splurge on it (so 200MHz or $150 here and there are not your main concerns). There is something to be said for a balanced high-end system. Don't think a "fancy new CPU" will solve all your problems.
I don't think a system based on Pentium D 8xx will have any problems running Longhorn, but you may be missing out on a few features that may be introduced with that operating system. This is always a danger so either you buy without expectation or you upgrade your hardware in time with OS release cycles.
Also - whats the top of the line intel cpu as of right now and when will the next one be available?
The Pentium D 840 (3.2GHz) would be the top of the line dual core for desktops (there is also the Extreme Edition (Pentium XE) 840, but I fail to see what this offers over the D model at the moment. Is it really only HyperThreading?).
Like Epicstruggle said, you should at least look into what AMD offers. Maybe even consider a traditional SMP (AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon) board. These will require registered RAM, but you might get good/better performance for less money. I'm not going to say that Intel Pentium Ds are bad, but if you really want to pound on a dual-core/SMP system you would probably be better off with an Athlon X2 or Opteron. The Pentium D is NetBurst based (Pentium 4) and those processors suffer from memory access with just one core. They are relatively good at streaming operations like video encoding, but once you go more general the Athlon stomps all over them.
One of the main selling points of the Pentium 4 was Hyper-Threading, the ability to run multiple (two) threads concurrently on one core. With dual core this advantage is removed so any argument that a Pentium 4 multi-tasks better than an Athlon 64 is no longer important. The Pentium D dual core and the Athlon X2 both have two cores and no Hyper-Threading and in this scenario the Athlon makes the Pentium look rather weak by comparison.
Sorry to sound so negative about something you are obviously excited about buying, but I feel I would do you a disservice to at least not mention these points.