Glen:
 

Reformatting my drive is not an issue. I have no problem doing it. Are dual Xeons the way to go with Vegas? Keep in mind, Vegas 6 really put my CPU to the test (hence the render failures from overheating) will the 64 bit dual Xeon CPUs handle the workload better? And how much of a performance increase between their 2.6 gHz and 3.6 gHz processors? I am on the precipice of buying a new motherboard with the dualies.

Waddaya think?

Gateway didn't push me into anything. I checked the Gateway site and it had a list of upgrades with dates later than the date I bought my computer from them. So naturally, I wanted to make sure my drivers were the most recent. Well, this is what it got me. And a computer guru friend of mine warned me that with BIOS upgrades, if you don't follow the instructions to the letter, this could happen.

A rule of thumb that works well for video editing is to divide clock speeds. If comparing from the same processor line (of which there are MANY), divide clock speeds and knock 10% off the difference.

If comparing newer to older, divide clock speeds but don't knock 10% off (because all parts of the computer scale up in performance, not just that one part). The is less accurate because there tends to be many changes from older to newer, and they all affect performance (not necessarily positively, a good example being the Prescott Pentiums being slower than Northword cores at things other than video).

That quick rule won't work for comparing dual cores/processors to single processors (single core). Performance increases (comparing the same clock speeds) range from around -5% to 90%. Look at benchmarks specific to your program. Unfortunately I haven't seen any Vegas benchmarks comparing dual to single, but things did get faster for duals in Vegas 6 (although it still has a few bugs). MPEG2 encoding is faster with dual processors.
If you run 2 instances of Vegas, duals are faster.

Actually the Northwood-core Pentiums run a lot cooler than the newer processors out now. And dual processors may handle the strain worse, because they draw more power and you need a more powerful power supply. But more or less, processors don't overheat as long as you install the heatsink/fan/processor properly (read the instructions, because you can damage your processors).

2- I don't think your render failures were from overheating.

Thanks, Glen. Maybe I'll just stick with replaceing what I got. It'll be alot cheaper.