I remember that when I bought my trusty 8-core machine (
host 2901600 - crunching for seti since, as it says, November 2006), memory speed was a problem.
It was originally running on Windows XP, 32-bit, with 2GB of RAM. But it's a workstation-class machine, built on a server motherboard, and wants to run memory in 4-channel mode. Adding two 1GB RAM modules to the two I already had enabled that mode, and increased throughput by some 25%. There are graphs somewhere in Number Crunching - we spent some time talking about it at the time. In particular, running 8 shorties - 'VHAR' - at a time really bogged it down.