If you are using the computer strictly for gaming and nothing else,you would benefit much more from a dual core even now,than you would getting a quad core. Although your system will run a bit quicker all around with a quad,unless you're doing media encoding, you wont see much difference in gaming performance,and in some cases worse. There are a few games that are multi-threaded that would benefit from the extra cores,but even that would be counter-productive if you planned on doing any overclocking because the clock speeds you can attain with dual cores more than make up for the multi-threading advantage you would get with a quad.this information applies to intels chips (TBH i know little about amd processors) xD i hope that doesnt completely invalidate my points =P. Not meant to discourage, just had to give my two cents as i was in your position not too long ago weighing the i7 quads and the new dual cores. If you are strictly a gamer and want the best performance i would go for a high end dual core and overclock it to your hearts content. a decent video card can take care of the rest. I know this is quite the novel but i just had to add in before you think about going to 64 bit ask around,maybe try it out first if possible. I see 64 bit os as the oxymoron of performance. It runs very sluggish unless you have excessive amounts of ram, which makes overclocking quite the pain (for intels anyways?) . Basically you want 64 bit OS for the same reason you would want a quad core (media encoding) except the 64 bit OS kills gaming performance,whereas the quad doesn't. if you are going to game go windows 7
. Well i think ill go get this published,my longest post to date xD.
good post. if you're just a gamer, then use a dual-core and just overclock. Cheapest solution.
and X3's are unlockable, but like someone said earlier, it's a luck of the draw. Technically, X3's are the same as X4's, they've just gone through the binning process because they didn't make stable X4's. It's possible to unlock the 4th core just like it's possible to overclock; you're simply going out of the manufacturer's specs. Just no guarantee it will be stable.
