Clarify this for me, please

[Devil's Prophet]

To be fair, I did mention expensive speaker cables first.

Fair enough.

On the other hand, both rely on human perception. The typical human ear is usually not able to determine the different between pretty good hardware and highend hardware. Similar to the old adage of how a new system has to be 50% faster than the old one before a person can perceive it to be faster.

That's right, but my point was that this so called responsiveness, being quantitative in nature, CAN be turned into an objective benchmark, if only people had the means and the ambition to do that. Then we would be able to bench this unexplored range of performance and back up this people's statements with hard numbers, which isn't possible now because of the lack of this kind of benchmarks. I don't know if this view is a realistic one, but I do know that no benchmark is ever completely right in judging a processor's total performance.

Anyway, with only little experience on dual cores (which are in computers that are not mine) and no experience with quads whatsoever, I have little right to speak out of experience. I merely like to think about it and pose theories that at the time seem (partially) plausible to me and to the stories I read here and there on boards. In all this thinking and being pulled and drawn from one brand to the other, I will someday be finally able to make a decent conclusion as to which brand and matching platform I'd choose above all others. If only it was easier...