David Jones wrote: (snip)
It'll be awhile before I jump higher than that, probably. The bottlenecks in PC performance are such that speeds higher than that produce little difference in actual performance. As one e-mail tagline I've seen said, "All computers wait at the same speed!"
While that's true for many applications, for Fractint what really matters is raw CPU speed. That means you can actually gain from upgrading to a faster processor even if the performance of the other parts of the system remains the same. Fractint doesn't even care about memory bandwidht, which is a typical bottleneck for other number-crunching applications that have to consume/produce a lot of data. So the bottom line is, if creating fractals is the main factor in buying a new machine, all you really need to look for is a fast CPU. Pedro