Core 2 Duo vs. Core 2 Quad - Overall

please read forums people asked that question.......shortly saying gaming=dual core video editing/multitasking=quad.........

If you mostly game the Dual core will be better.

If you do photoshop a lot or encode then the quad will be better.

Personally I feel a 2.83GHZ quad will cover pretty much everything you want to do on a computer.

Good advice (sarcasm)
Have a rough day or something? Lol why would you bother posting that.

i would get the quad. future games will support multi cores. If u run vista ur extra cores will take care of other tasks. Dual core is best with games currently because of higher clocks but the difference isnt much. a quad cores can oc to over 3.0ghz so the difference between the 2 cpus is like a 2-5fps max. But if u dont oc the dual core has a slight edge.

Quad

...unless gaming and surfing the net are the ONLY thing you do on that rig.

If you multi-task at all a quad will be feel much smoother, IME.

yeah you're right, that wasn't very nice of me.

This article with benchies might give you a better handle on performance and price
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14756

thanks for the great amount of responses. so i was just wondering how far do you think i can oc the quad with a stock fan and heatsink? (i am leaning towards the quad). i have no experience doing oc but ill figure it out you have to start somewhere  . and i realize there were other topics like that but those were last winter and wondered if anything changed because technology expands faster. thanks again.

I'm not sure you can OC much with the stock heatsink. Might as well get a decent aftermarket heatsink for 30$ or so.

yea i probably will, but just in case how far with stock? 3.1?

I guess it depends on the cooling of your case, room temperature, the particular processor you have, etc. but I'd be very surprised if you could hit 3.0 with the stock cooler.

No brainer. Get the Quad, as even games that are not optimized for one will benifit from the other cores taking over windows processes.

3GHz on the Q9550 would be easy on the stock cooler because its not that far away anyways.

I prefer th quad core because I tend to do a lot even when I am playing a game. Its nice to be able to alt+tab out of TF2 to check the internet and open some other programs then alt+tab back in without it ever slowing down.

Sometimes I will run my anti-virus scan, have some IE7s open and a few other programs while playing TF2 and it just keeps on going. I have a Q660 OCed to 3GHz BTW.

get a quad since after a while your service tab will get fill up pretty badly specially under vista. the extra cores thats not "working" can take care of the background service and let the other cores concentrate on game.

remember all review done is on a fresh install windows with most service turned off and the dual core excels.in real life you wouldnt turn all service off and reinstall windows everytime you play game!do you?

plus the new 45nm quad dont overclock as bad they go fairly high as well.so there isnt a major gap in between dual and quad core.

A slightly lower clocked quad will outperform higher clocked duals even in non-quad optimized games, contrary to conventional wisdom. It takes around 200+ mhz difference for dual to pull ahead. This is due to background processes moving to spare cores in quad, freeing 2 cores dedicated for the large program.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2quad-...

Nice find Dagger.

As we've said...get a Quad.

Depends on the game, if its TF2 which is insanely CPU intensive since it doesn't support more than 1 core, then the Dual is better. I'm going to assume that dual you're considering on purchasing is the E8600, with a good air cooler you should be able to hit 4.5ghz which would help in alot of situations, especially in today's gaming.

PS. Chuck Norris once played Russian Roulette with a loaded gun and WON.

how did this guy think we found this?

Hi,

I have a core 2 quad (2.5 mhz) intel processor machine and i'm not very happy with that. If you copy something from a CD as well as installing to the hardisk at the same time, the system will hang for ever. I dont know what is all about core 2 quad !!..

Your issue has nothing to do with the processor speed but Hard Drive/optical drive bottleneck.

Even worse if you copy from a cd and install something using that same cd... the post isn't too clear.

Also if your Core2Quad has a name such as HP/Compaq or gateway is will clearly perform slower as those are often made of cheap parts.

Anonymous=OwnEd

So anyway,this is some useful information,seeing as i'm thinking about getting either a core 2 quad or a core 2 duo. Going to be building my first computer soon   . I WAS going to get a i5 since it was similarly priced quad core and newer technology,but theres not many motherboards that support 1156 socket and I hear it's going to be outdated-ish. Plus i5 uses ddr3     which is a bit too pricy for me now.