Hardware requirements

We're running an SQL 2000 server (Standard Edition) that is running
particularly slowly on it's existing "low end" hardware.
We have want to purchase a faster machine for it and have had two
near-identical quotes for:
A - Twin XEON 3.8 GHz processors
B - Twin XEON dual core 2.8 GHz processors (so effectively a quad processor)
What hardware would benefit SQLServer 2000 most?
Thanks for any advice
Griff
Additional information
This SQL Server services a single application (single user), rather than a
multi-connection scenairo. Some of the queries take literally hours to run
on the old hardware.
Griff
|||> This SQL Server services a single application (single user), rather than a
> multi-connection scenairo.
Multiple cores are most useful for multiple concurrent queries and parallel
plans, including index rebuilds. If you are focusing on improving
performance of a single concurrent query that doesn't involve parallelism,
faster CPUs are more beneficial than more cores.

> Some of the queries take literally hours to run on the old hardware.
Be sure you know where your bottleneck is before you throw hardware at the
problem. It is often the case that much improvement can be made from schema
and application tuning. Once the app is well tuned, you can identify the
hardware bottleneck and address accordingly. Faster processors might not
help much if you have a disk bottleneck.
Hope this helps.
Dan Guzman
SQL Server MVP
"Griff" <howling@.the.moon> wrote in message
news:%233kEehuMGHA.1124@.TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> Additional information
> This SQL Server services a single application (single user), rather than a
> multi-connection scenairo. Some of the queries take literally hours to
> run on the old hardware.
> Griff
>