I just saw this thread in passing ... don't wanna hijack it

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I've built one desktop in my life ... dedicated for audio stuff... Windows based, everything was SCSI, a digital soundcard for DAC, etc. it was a beast. I could have used the first Pentium from many years earlier, and it would have still screamed

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All computers are a combination of processor speeds, memory access (DMA, etc.), amount of memory, fragmented (mebbe?), I/O to devices, and then network stuff, etc. if applicable, and if ya want to improve performance, one must improve "the one" which is the actual bottleneck for performance.
I can tune-a-fish with the best of the best ... and love fishing threads
I only fished for REALLY big fish tho' ... except that one desktop years ago.
I just threw that audio processing bea$t in the electronics dumper bin.
If you want real performance .... don't use Windows as the OS ... a bloated pig will not win many races ... not against real competition on the fast tracks... ymmv.
-A Soapbox racer
One more thing .... multi-core, multi-processors, etc. ... which is better?
1 @ xxxx speed
2 @ xxx speed
10 @ xxx speed
It always depends .... on $10 million big blue boxes... or even toys for end users to surf with
Now we can talk about how folks don't really "get" network "speeds" either...
that all depends too
Queueing Theory 101...