2 CPU's

when i check my hardware out with the hardware manager i notice that i have 2 processors in the processor tab ! is that normal ? i ran a dxdiag and made a screen shot so you can see, my windows is in german but its spelled prozessor and it says i am running 2 cpu's, can i get rid of one, and will getting rid of one make my computer slower or faster ?


http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/5892/desktopua4.jpg

 

My p4 3.0ghz reads 2 processors also but doesnt show it like that in the task manager (im on XP though) however, everywhere else it says it's two processors because of the hyperthreading. you can disable hyperthreading in the BIOS if u want lol but it would make it slower

 

Viper_boy is 100% on the nose. You have two CPU's showing because your CPU is hyper-threaded. Mine appears like this in the Direct-x diagnose utility, as well as showing two CPU's under device-manager and the task manager.

Unless you are having some kind of problem you think is related to hyper-threading, leave it alone. Here is an article that explains what hyperthreading is and it's benefits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

But in a nutshell - hyperthreading equipped processors pretend to be two "logical" processors - meaning as far as the operating system knows there are actually two "physical" processors present. This allows the operating system to schedule two threads or processes simultaneously - which results in a nice overall performance boost.

You can also choose which "processor" a program will operate on - if you run more then one program at a time this can often be useful. I find it fun to experiment - running benchmarks after each change to see what effect, pro or con, the change has on performance. But then I'm a bit OCD about such things

 

Thanks for the responses, the only reason i asked is because i just had this pc built, and it runs like shit! my girlfriend has a 2.0 ghz amd semperon processor with one stick of 512 ram and an on board graphics card that is 32 mb and her cpu runs better than mine. Does what kind of motherboard make a difference on how your computer runs ?