I've been looking to upgrade my hardware, as I've started to work on video and it's brought my meager 3.33GH to a crawl at times. I've been flipping around the idea of going dual-core and/or 64-bit and I was wondering if it really makes that much of a difference with audio/video editing. Tom's Hardware had a thing on intel vs amd dual-core and in the audio/video sections it didn't really seem to make that big of a difference. Like, if an encode took 3 minutes on an athlon64 it might take 2:45 on an x2.
I see that Cakewalk Studio 5 has a 64-bit version, but nothing else seems to. Is there really a worthwhile reason to go with those new things, in this respect?
I spec'd out a few mobo/cpu combos to see price comparisons. Do the price differences really equate to higher video frame rates, more trackable channels, etc...
JJ

Single-Core AMD:
$175 Athlon64 3200 (2.0GH)
$ 85 K8T800Pro/nForce3 Ultra
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$260 Total

Dual-Core AMD:
$325 Athlon64 X2 3800 (2.0GH)
$ 85 K8T800Pro/nForce3 Ultra
====
$410 Total

Single-Core Intel:
$100 CeleronD 340 (2.93GH)
$ 75 i865PE (478)
====
$175 Total

Dual-Core Intel:
$250 Pentium D 820 (2.8GH)
$ 75 i865PE (775)
====
$325 Total