I just upgraded from:
- Athlon 3000+
- WD 7200RPM hard drive
to
- X2 3800 (overclocked to 2.4GHZ, stock cooling)
- WD Raptor 10,000 RPM drive
I am a .net programmer, and use this system at work. The Visual Studio solution I am working with contains 56 projects, for a total of about 250,000 lines of code.
Prior to my upgrade, opening the project took forever. Building was slow. And starting in Debug mode was best done right before lunch (hopefully it would be up when you got back).
After the upgrade everything is alot faster. I dont think the X2 has a whole lot to do with it. Monitoring CPU usage using
Process Explorer shows very little CPU usage most of the time.
One thing that is faster is the first load of the web-project after a build. The ASP worker process kicks in a bunch of compilers to compile the pages. It seems to launch the compilers on seperate processors and the first compile is really smoking fast now.
So I think the X2 is helping a bit, but the 10,000 RPM drive is probably responsible for the vast majority of the speed increase that I see.
Jeff