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Thats my point exaclty to all these people saying wait wait wait... its a damn hard race to win with soooo much coming and going at the pace this industry is going its getting to be a damn EXPENSIVE hobby now.

And come fall you will buy that NELAHAM and after 2 months of sales another GREATER CPU will be the buzz word. This also applies to every component.

To be honest, the performance problems in original SupCom were partly caused by inefficient pathfinding. In Forged Alliance, I can play 8 player games up to 40x40 maps without significant slow down on my Pentium D for a while. Even when I do begin to slow down, my friend who has a Q6600 at stock is only 1 sim speed above me.

Well.. to be fair I mostly represent the enthusiast overclocking side. My Q6600 at 3.6 runs it without a hickup.

Other than that, as was said, there are things that effectively use 4 cores.

At the same time.. Ok.. here is the argument people.

I can overclock, can I overcore?

A machine geared for gaming will be much better off with a higher performance video card than a quad core CPU. Your argument assumes that the consumer has a large budget and encodes videos all the time, but largely, neither of those are the case.

@SupCom

SupCom has 2 primary threads, two light audio threads, and a dozen other negligible threads. If my Pentium D clocked up to 7.2ghz and had 4mb of L2 cache on each core, my sim speed and FPS will be close to the performance of your Q6600. But alas, it doesn't.

Completely agree with you on the point about the Quad Core.

My assumption however is anyone asking about Dual vs Quad Core obviously has the fiscal ability to afford either.

My primary point was despite what anyone wants to think, a Q6600 is more future proof than a dual core and will last longer. The sweet spot will still be around 3.0 GHz for a while longer. Nehalem might be great, or it might be a bust. I don't think it'll be a C2D over P4 situation again.

So again, I can always overclock my C2Q. I couldn't add more cores to an E8400.

Have to agree with many here, OC quads are nice. If you have no intention of OC a quad to a comparable speed, then a higher-speed dual will work for you just fine.

I'd also lean towards the Q6600 OC'd to at least 3Ghz. We can already see the kinds of performance increase in games optimised for quads like SupCom and Alan Wake (saw a news post today that said +30% improvement, though the game's not out yet). When most games are quad-optimised in the next year, it'll almost be like the Q6600 is getting an updrade! I think it'll work very well for the long term (in computer years of course)

As for Nehalem, well I'm definately not going to be an early adopter/tester for that. I'll wait for the second gen motherboards and bios before I take that plunge, and a Q6600 would certainly hold up very well until then!

Hiya Guys

Thought I'd reign the thread in a bit!

I am looking to spend about £900 on this build, so a processor up to £250 is within my price range.
So I can afford either the quad, or the dual.

I am also planning on overclocking whichever processor I get, to a reasonable level, where it is running cool as possible, and the CPU fan doesnt sound like a boeing 747.

At the moment, I am leaning towards a quad. This will save me a bit of cash, so I can opt for a 8800GTX card, which should future proof me even longer than a GTS.

My only problem now is, do I wait a few weeks for the 45nm Quads to come out (I don't know what these are called and when they are coming out, can someone enlighten me?).
OR, are the gains on these new processors not worth the wait, and i'm assuming, extra money?

Cheers for all your replies so far guys!

The dual core would probably do just as fine. Steam, AIM, MSN, Yahoo... come on. Those programs site idle 99% of the time so it wouldn't matter if it were dual or quad. If it did matter, difference would be too small to even be worth it. On the other hand, if you were ripping/transcoding a DVD (using 100% of 2 cores) and then played Crysis, that would make a difference. The program needs to be using CPU time to impact the system, not just "be open and running (idle)".

If I were you, I wouldn't worry about the 8800 GTX. The G92 version of the GTS is a much better value. It runs slightly cooler, is a smaller process so should equate to lower power consumption, and in some cases bests the GTX in FPS. Grab the GTS for now, and go EVGA so that just in case, you can step up to x2 or next gen if that should happen in 90 days

I have 22 days left on my step-up from my GT. I'm hoping that one of two things happen. Either the ATI dual proc cards come out and I step up to a GTS and sell it still in the box, and I buy 2 x2 ATI cards OR I just upgrade to the GTS and be happy. The step up program and overall customer service of EVGA are my biggest praises and reasons to suggest them. On the ATI side, I guess I would have to suggest Sapphire or Asus.