Quote Originally Posted by Motiv View Post
Depends on the application. For the average desktop user, Quad Core is overkill. Browsing the web, spreadsheets and word-processing don't require anything other than duel core.

For a gamer, quad core will rule the roost. All of the latest game coming out in the next 20 months will take advantage of multiple cores.

I've no doubt a 2.6-3.0ghz Phenom will be competitive with equally priced Intels but I very much doubt we will see a AMD take the performance crown for a long time to come.


Speaking of the Phenom. Are any of these chips actual Duel cores or are they all Quads but with two core disabled?
Do not use games to determine the performance of the desktop. game tests are favour of intel: games use too many branch, load/store-dependency-chain and so on. Only 10-20% of the instructoins in games are floating-point instructions. game tests are biased.