Workstation advice please

[Anonymous]

Our IT consultants have suggested the following system for myself. I know nothing about computers, they know about as much about Archicad. As a comparison to what I have now (see signature, this will be passed down to a colleague the currently has an abacus) is this a significant step up, or could more be suggested that would further enhance the system for me, at an affordable price (I am not the one with the money).
Most of the work we do is bigger than a house, but smaller than a shopping mall, mostly construction drawings but a bit of rendering / presentation too.
Advice (in plain English please) is much appreciated....

HP Graphics workstation
HP xw4300 (which apparently has...)
Proc: Intel P4 - 640 (3.2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB, single core) Proc SUPP Hyper-Threading Tech
Mem: 2GB 533MHZ PC2-4300 DDR-2 upg to 8GB
HDD: 160GB SATA 3.0 GB/s HDD (7200rpm) with Native Command Queuing + 80GB OS drive
Graphics: ATI FireGL V3100 PCI Express (128MB)
Controller: Intg 4 channel SATA Cntrl with RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 functionality
Comms: Intg Broadcon 5752 10/100/1000 for HP (PCI Express i/face)

As a comparison they have offered an HP 7200 P4 Standard PC 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM at about 75% of the price of the workstation.

Thanks

[Da3dalus]

I just got my dual-core Xeon 2.33 (just one CPU, but room for another), which should be insanely fast. Unfortunately, it's just marginally faster with ArchiCAD. Lightworks seems speedier, but everything else is very close. My old computer had a Pentium IV 3.4 GHz (can't even buy these from Dell anymore), and it still screams. I think ArchiCAD 10 is still dependent on clock speed, and doesn't really utilize dual cores or newer processor architecture very well. I hope to see some improvemests in ArchiCAD 11.

[TomWaltz]

Da3dalus wrote:
I just got my dual-core Xeon 2.33 (just one CPU, but room for another), which should be insanely fast. Unfortunately, it's just marginally faster with ArchiCAD. Lightworks seems speedier, but everything else is very close. My old computer had a Pentium IV 3.4 GHz (can't even buy these from Dell anymore), and it still screams. I think ArchiCAD 10 is still dependent on clock speed, and doesn't really utilize dual cores or newer processor architecture very well. I hope to see some improvemests in ArchiCAD 11.

Archicad only uses one processor at a time. Lightworks can use multiple. There was no improvements regarding that in AC11.