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I've been running my lame 'render farm' into the ground lately. I've got 4 machines and they've been cranking 24/7 for over a week. It's time for some more horsepower!

My question is, since 1 of my boxes is a dual core 6400, should I pick up a quad core chip for it or move on and look at a dual quad xeon?

If I went for the quad (which is a drop in upgrade - attractive because it's so simple) then which one?

I've got 2 lame machines: P4 @ 3 ghz and a Dell M70
And 2 dual cores: an x2 3800 @ 2.5 and a 6400 @ 3.2

I could save a bundle buying one quad replacement chip and building another quad machine versus the dual quad (although the descriptions vetted here by ivox and others make it seem very very nice!) and still have 8 cores.

I'd replace the P4 with an E6600 quad processor. It can overclock pretty well and you get a very nice performance for a relatively low price, I think it's about $550 now.

Hi Mihai,

I came up with a new "most cores for least money plan (tm)"

The system I work on is an oc'd 6400 with all the bells and whistles. Take the 6400 chip out of that system and drop in an e6600.

That system has 4gb of oca ddr2 800 platinum in it. I can live with 2, so take 2 out. I also have a spare 250gb hard drive and a spare quadro fx1400 - So all I need to do is buy a 50$ case, 90$ psu and a 200$ mb and I'll resurrect my 6400 chip.

So, I'll have 5 systems and my core count will go from 6 to 10. Probably I should stop using my dell m70 since this morning, after rendering for 5 days straight it was starting to smell like melting plastic a bit

My total cost would be under 1000$, not bad for adding 4 cores.