I began my journey into dual core processors on April 21, 2006. That was the day I ordered a Pentium D 805 from NCIX. Then on April 25, once everything had arrived and I proceeded to set everything up.
The first step in building this system actually started before April 21 when I placed my order. I have had a web server for a really long time, almost 5 years. Instead of having a dedicated machine for a webserver, I had been using an older Pentium 3 500mhz that was also a general everyday use machine for members of my family. As well, in November of 2005 I also setup a Pentium 166mhz machine to be a MySQL server running on Ubuntu. This machine did its job but as expected, the performance on it was relatively slow. Thus brought the need for a better, faster machine.
This upgrade spent a long time in the planning phase. In fact, I had probably thought about getting a better webserver computer for 3 years or so. This time around, I knew I had the money and I wasn't afraid to spend a little bit more to get something better. My initial requirements included at least 1GB of ram, a medium speed processor (P4 2.4ghz), and a moderate to small hard drive (40 - 120gb). I felt that these requirements would be more than enough to power Apache, MySQL, and whatever else might be running such as stats.
In the third week of April, on NCIX's webpage I noticed that they had a couple of bare bones systems. These systems intrigued me since I felt they were priced very cheap and they appeared to provide decent performance. The two systems I was looking at were a P4 630 and a Pentium D 805. With a webserver, I then began to think of the greater benefits I might encounter with the dual core and at this point my mind was set. I was going to get a Pentium D 805 processor in my new machine.