I am currently thinking of buying a new system, going from a single core Athlon64 to a newer processor. The obvious dilemma is going quad-core or dual core. So lets see:
a)Quad core
have up to double the price of a similar clocked dual core cpu.
b)Quad core
have two times the watt consumption of a dual core cpu. Meaning
double working costs . If the cpu is overclocked we talk about 100 watts difference per hour only. Considering that a lot of people leave the pc open at nights in order to download stuff from the net, that kind of difference means a lot of money spend meaningless really, added to the increased purchase cost. Sure there is coul n' quiet and other stuff that can help, but still the difference will be double considering a dual core.
c)Quad core have double the processing power. But for what really? The only applications currently
for a home user (and probably also in the future) that can benefit a lot are video editing applications.
So if you are not a video editing maniac, making divx, H264 mp4 movies the added power is useless. Video games, emulation, internet, office applications do not benefit or are already fast for a home user.
d)Quad core have less overclocking capabilities ,meaning less performance with single threaded applications, like emulation let's say?
Funny think is that the companies are thinking of eight cores already. Now is that useless or what? Maybe the paradise for professional work (servers, researchers), but for home users? I really hope that they think of something better because the core think is starting to become ridiculous.
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System Specifications: Athlon64 3200+ @ 2,12 ghz, 1GB DDR RAM, 9600GT 512MB, 200+250 GB HD, Windows xp sp3