Quote Originally Posted by Nebulus View Post
Scratch what I said earlier about cache advantage, it's wrong. If crysis only supports two cores, then a Q9450 and E8400 should perform EXACTLY the same when at equivalent clock speeds. Why? Because I just did some research and the 12 mb cache of the Q9450 is not shared amongst all 4 processors. The Quads are just 2 "core-2-duo" processors on one chip right? So each pair of cores has access to it's own 6mb cache independent of the other.

So if crysis is only dual core supported, those two cores being utilized by Crysis only have 6mb of cache to work with... just like the E8400.
Not necessarily...

Think a bit more. If the E8400 has 6MB of cache total and two cores only, then yes the max amount of cache available to it is 6MB. But how much cache is available to the quad depends on WHICH two cores the game uses. If it is two "adjacent" cores on the same die then the performance and cache use will be identical. But if the cores are on different dies then potentially they can access 12MB of cache between them as in your first suggestion, so there should be a cache boost to performance.

IIRC the OS schedules threads to cores based on core load, so if you can set app affinities so that one core is always less used, and an "opposite" core is the preferred one for the game, then you might be able to force usage of opposite cores like that. Or maybe you can set multiple affinities for a single app, not sure as I don't have a multicore proc right now.