On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:30:21 GMT, no@spam.invalid (tluxon)
wrote:

>should be near the equal of the A64 3200+ for multitasking duties.
>The P4 2.8C Northwood would address my heat and power concerns, but
>I'm sure it will have much less upgradeability. Is that a big deal?
>What direction would you go if you were looking more for multitasking
>than for gaming?

The idea of "multitasking" is in itself not very useful. It
is necessary to consider the specific tasks.

If your tasks benefit from the P4 architecture, that's the
CPU to choose. If they don't, or if you don't know (for
most common uses), even the older Athlon XP well outperforms
the P4 in the speed ranges you're considering, let alone the
A64.

Multitasking is not in itself significant to the CPU, any
can switch tasks fine. More significant would be that you
had ample memory. Generally the primary issue is always
what the most demanding tasks are, or at least those that
need to be preformed in realtime such as gaming or actively
video-editing, rather than those jobs that can run in the
background or while you're away from the system, such as
ripping or re-encoding DVDs, or doing the video editing jobs
that are just a linear reprocessing.

If you need such realtime performance from multiple tasks,
you should choose a dual core CPU. Again the one chosen
would depend on those most demanding tasks.