Programs and games that use 4 cores

[hitesh12]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/243332-28-programs-cores-quad-core-chip

Is above info correct ?
Its quite old.
Do someone has a link for a page for the same other than the above ?
Or can someone take some pain to make a thread regarding this ?

I am going to buy i3-2100 over 955 and want to know if there is a mainstream program that would use 4 core.
I'll be losing 2 cores by not choosing 955 so just wanted to know if this loss would be large .

Thnx

(btw I don't believe winrar uses for cores
See this
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/88?vs=289
Winrar section , i3 outperforms 955
Please tell me if I'm wrong)

 

[esrever]

winrar uses 4 cores but is not efficient at it If I remember correctly.

Most mainstream programs don't need to use 4 cores so they don't.

programs such as video editing and rendering programs will use as many cores as there is. 7zip uses 4 cores.

So newer games will use 4 cores. Games made on the source engine uses 4 cores. Battlefield 3 multiplayer uses 4 cores. Its about 50/50 whether a game uses more than 2 cores. Generally speaking tho 80% of game will run better on the i3 even if they use more cores because they really only use 2 main threads and the i3 cores are better.

 

[hitesh12]

What about photoshop ?

 

[Robi_g]

What programs do you use or plan on using? It's pointless buying a CPU for someone else's needs or programs.

 

[esrever]

photoshop uses 4 cores in some things and not others.

 

[jaguarskx]

(btw I don't believe winrar uses for cores
See this
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/88?vs=289
Winrar section , i3 outperforms 955
Please tell me if I'm wrong)

WinRar uses more than two cores. The problem with the comparison you linked to is that the Core i3-2100 has a more efficient / powerful CPU architecture than the Phenom II X4. The link below compares the Core i3-2100 to the quad core Core i5-2400; both running at the same clock speed of 3.1GHz. Since both CPUs use the Sandy Bridge CPU core; the Core i5-2400 is faster than the Core i3-2100 by a little bit which point to the fact that it does not effectively use 4 cores.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/363?vs=289

 

[hitesh12]

I'll be using photoshop , video editing softwares .(latest versions)
Will be converting a lot of hd videos

 

[esrever]

then you'd best get 4 cores.

try the phenom II 960t, it has a chance to unlock to a 6 core. Very useful in those programs.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

if you can still find a phenom 955 then get one. purely for gaming i would go with the intel cpu though. Most games will use 4 cores, but it will not mean 4x the performance. Additional cores after number 3 generally don't increase performance by much at all.