question 1 : yes, sonar 5 supports multiple cores so it will spread the load
question 2 : depends on what application, for music production : yes. I didn't eat one yet, I wouldn't know if they are good.

Btw: i'd go for the dual 2.4, the price tag of the 2.6 is a little high, especially if you consider the extra power.

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I forgot to mention that the dual core machine is only about £420 $700 brand new. That's for the machine with 500Mb ram, M-Audio 2496 sound card and windows xp home, keyboard mouse etc.

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Eat, sleep, breath trance.

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The Intel Dual cores (Pentium D's) are very good yes, and a dual core CPU will give you a very large perfomance boost using Sonar (since it's a multi-thread program with support for multiple CPUs)

However, be advised, that the new Conroe (Intel Core 2 Duo) CPU's that have recently gone retail are CRUSHING anything that the world has ever seen before. The cheapest conroe is around 200$ I think, and it'll tear apart any other CPU.... I just ordered me an E6600, cost me c.a. $350 but with a little overclocking this thing eats the $1200 AMD FX-62 alive
You can also get relatively high end models of AMD X2 and Intel Pentium D dual cores for about 100-150$ these days, since conroe is really pushing the market. Those are very good models, and the price is just rediculous (I'm actually thinking about buying a second desktop system, just because they're so cheap! you can build a great dual core 1 gig ram system for less than 400$ these days).

(btw, this post is not paid for or supported in any way by Intel inc. )

Thought he meant the core 2 type processor.. I would definately stretch the budget and go for that one right now. Like low profile said, it's the best on the market right now for the price. I would also go for at least 1 gig ram instead of 512 mb. 700$ seems low budget, where they tend to save on the power supply, the case, the fans, ... which isn't really a good thing for a DAW. Tbh you should double the budget to get a decent workstation, then again it's up to what you want to do with it.

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Is there a difference between the commercial Conroe's you can buy for PC and the ones that are included with the MacIntel's?

I was customizing a machine on dell.com and i had a dual core 3.2mhz 1gig ram, like everything top notch 2 monitors it was like 6 grand hahaha

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