Is Draw Distance (speed/smoothness) down to your PC's power?

Having now moved back to the mainland from living around OS sims for a while, I've had to shut my draw distance back down to a resonable level (about 12

Whilst I was living on Openspace sims (loads of islands on loads of sims all next ot each other) I had my draw distance set at around 300 for most of the time and was lovely and smooth.

Now, I'm assuming this is entirely down to the fact that in comparison to the mainland, on a private openspace (Homestead) estate there's far less "Content" (junk!) in my line of sight!

I was wondering how much of this is down the the speed of my PC, the speed of the link between my PC and LL or the SL client itself beign a bottleneck?

Basically if I increase the power of my PC, will this help the smoothness when I increase my Draw Distance on the "Heavily Populated" mainland?

Current spec = Core2Duo E6600, 4 GB Ram, 8800GTS 340MB onboard memory, XP Pro.

No answers... Hmmmm....

Well, I've been searching these forums trying to get some info to my question myself.

All a bit confusing.

Some say a Quad CPU is better as you can share the load, others say SL is single threaded so won't make any difference, and then there's the "Use Multiple Threads" option under the advanced menu, so I'm a bit confused there.

Some say SLI makes things 20 to 30% faster, other say makes no difference.

Some say it's worthless getting a faster graphics card as it's not the graphics card that's the bottleneck and anyway it's the OpenGL side which is important.

All about as clear as mud !!!!

I can only say this for myself.. I recently bought a new PC, running Duo Core , 4gb of ram, and a awesome Nvidia Geforce GTX 280. Before that I was walking in mud, draw distance set to 128 max. Windlight, atmospheric shaders.. yea right...
With my new machine it doesnt matter were I go , I have specs to high, water refelection it doesnt matter. I still get framerates up to 50 and more.

So what I am trying to say here is, that your machine definitely is a bottleneck.
You should always consider to buy a graphics card instead of having onboard graphics. Its just not that good. Of course SL has issues, server troubles etc. But since I have my new machine I no longer walk in mud. There you go )

On a similarly spec'd machine as yours (differences...8600GT, and 3 gigs DDR2 RAM), I can maintain about 25 to 35 FPS on the busiest of sims and exceed 60 on quiet sims. Everything is maxed on the preferrences except my draw distance is set at 256. You should do pretty good with that machine. Check what you have running in the background, check your download speed. Try these two sites:
http://www.speedtest.net/
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Your download speed should be near or at your ISP's advertised speed for the service you are subscribed to.........if not call them and ask why.

Setting affinity for a specific core for SL to run on really makes little (if any difference). And doing the mulity core trick will not help unless you have other tasks running in the background.......that could help but not that much.

Editing to add.........I'm running Vista......the memory hungry hog too. I believe your problem lays in the the setup of your computer. The computer is very capable of very good performance with SL.