gg wrote:
pardon my ignore, which system would be faster for widows 7 as workstation
running ms office 2007 suite, accounting (simply, quickbook):
i3 540 (3.06GHz) with 4 GB ddr3, Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2H
vs core 2 Q8300(2.5Ghz) with 4 GB 800Mhz ddr2, asus p4G41

assuming same dual port video card add on (MSI X8400GS-TD512EH)
at first glance it seems i3 would be faster for accounting side
not sure about multi-tasking, document/application switching, searching


You'd have to benchmark your actual workloads to tell the difference.
In practice, I don't think you'd notice the difference for most common
workloads (other than, conceivably, media processing, where the extra
physical cores might win).

Core i3 has hyperthreading, which means it can carry four simultaneous
contexts, just like the Q8300, so I don't think task-switching is an
issue. The only place where the extra physical cores will matter is if
you have a parallelized workload that will put the extra execution
resources of the extra physical cores to work.

Barring further information, I'd say the i3 is the better bet for you,
if only because of better memory technology.

Robert.