My office machine died last week. One of the CPUs went bad (one of two). Ticked off, I started looking at getting a brand new mega machine. My current work machine is a dual (now single) 650mhz P3 setup with 512MB of RAM.

So I go over to Dell's site and look at the top of the line workstations - 1 gig RAM, dual Xeon 1.7Ghz P4's, etc.

Then it dawned on me. Have computers simply lost their umph or has software simply not advanced fast enough to make getting such a mega system worth it?

I remember back in 1991 getting a 386SX-16 and getting a noticeable performance improvement simply by playing around with shadow bios.

But now, the various machines I have here at home don't really show much difference. I have a 1Ghz machine on the other side of this room that I"m not even using to type this (the P3-800mhz laptop is the main machine).

So what's the deal? Unless I'm doing CAD or rendering or something, what is a P4-1ghz (a dual no less) going to do for me, a developer, that a dual 650 setup won't be able to do in almost the exact same amount of time?

What are your views?