Although WinNT supports multiprocessing, NT itself does not distribute the
load. It is up to the application software to do so. It was my experience
that a dual processor system can actually slow down some operations. The
amount of speed reduction is rather small, but the point is that there is no
improvement over a single processor. The exception would be database
applications that are running on a server - these are usually designed to
make use of multiple processors.

While AMD K6-2 is great for video games and graphics, it does not perform as
well on floating point calculation intensive operations. Your best bet is
probably the Pentium II at the fastest speed that you can get. A P III may
not help very much and would cost a whole bunch more. You would do better to
put the money into more, and faster RAM. It is possible to get RAM modules
that will run at speeds of 133MHz, provided that your motherboard supports
such settings. Look into the specs for the motherboards to determine
performance advantages. Check www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com for
speed hacking information.

Peter Shkabara
[log in to unmask]
http://pyrite.wnmu.edu/~peter

-----Original Message-----
I have been given the go ahead to purchase a workstation which will be used
for heavy mathamatical calculations using Excel. I mostly run monte carlo
simulation models ( @Risk, Crystal Ball) which cause excel to re-calc a
spreadsheet as much as 10,000 - 20,000 or more times. Some of the model
files are extremely large spreadsheets, >50 mb.

The models are run under WinNT 4.0 WS. Would a dual processor system be
worth the price?

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