Advantage of a quad-core? ^_^;

Aside from texture loading, Sins only uses one core.

It would still be good for games which require some serious horsepower(I.E. Supreme Commander)

I have a story I like to tell people who think there's no advantage to quad-core rigs.

Those people usually use computers only for gaming, so they have no idea what a "core" actually does, other than it costs money. So that is why I did this like I did it, and not use a 3D rendering or some video encoding example.

So anyway, this friend comes to my place right after I bought a new beast with a Q6600. I was playing Sins at the time. Being one of those playstation-instant-gratification-people, he wasn't impressed with Sins, so he asked me to "show him something awesome". So I alt+tabbed from Sins(mind you, when you do this, Sins continues to run in the background), and I load up Crysis, which runs pretty well with all settings on High(no AA, ~32 FPS). After he is gobsmacked by the graphical beauty of two minutes of Crysis, the speakers announce that one of my planets is under siege, so I alt+tab back to Sins to deal with the problem. This is when he actually noticed that Sins was still running in the background. After being amazed at the sheer power of the rig, my DVD burner opened to eject the freshly burned DVD.

No, you're not going to feel the 2nd, 3rd or 4th core in Sins. But you will feel it if you like multitasking.

Well, i DO like to multitask, so that's nice. That would mean that since only one core's actually in use, I'd still technically have a 0.43 Ghz boost over my old computer. That's not bad of itself, is it? Maybe I'll just overclock the thing a few hundred mhz, see how things go

If you're gaming, go Dual Core. They're far easier to overclock too, if that's your thing.

Quads, for now, are only for major multitasking, like what Regicide did.

Games aren't taking advantage of quads right now; they're barely taking advantage of duals as it is. (Most of the load is still placed on the first core, and less places on the second, and if you have more cores than that they aren't used at all.) Overall, Duals for gaming and overclocking; Quads for major multitasking.

@ ThaMahstah

I agree about dual cores, but quads aren't just for multi-tasking. In addidtion to multi-tasking, quads are good at handling things like media transcoding and 3d rendering for those who do a lot of creative type things. Transcoding a video or rendering a 3d scene on a quad core will be about 2x faster than on a dual core of the same frequency.

But still, if the rig is mostly for gaming and you don't plan to have much running in the background, dual core is still the way to go.

@Cooltapes

A quad core at 2.83, would that be the Q9550 by any chance?  A great chip! I would have gotten it if I had waited a bit longer, I went with the q9450 because I couldn't wait. Quad cores are kinda hard to oc though... Intell has the multiplier locked realy low (8 for the q9450, 8.5 for the Q9550 I think) that means to oc you need a realy high fsb speed and that can cause problems for your ram.  I managed to get teh processor to run stable above 3 ghz, but to keep it stable I needed to have the ram running at 800 instead of 1600 (I went halfway inbetween for my final setup. Ram speed is pretty important and is ignored far to oftain...) Just watch those voltages... Quad cores are much less tolerant from what I've heard.

Eventually, more and more games are going to be multi-threadded, so they can use the new processors to their full glory. OC'ed or not, it's good have a system you know software is going to grow INTO, not away from.

Have seti @ home run on cores 2 and 3, just so they don't get lonely being never used by anything ever.

You sure it wasn't 800DDR ie 800*2?

Yes, that too.

Well sort of. The problem is necessesity is the mother of invention, and unless developers go out of their way to make their games take advantage of quads, they don't feel the need to. The only game I can think of that does off the top of my head is Crysis 2, and that was just for the novelty.

By the time games really do take advantage of quads, your chip is going to be out-of-date.

By the time the average PC gamer have quad cores in his rig and make it viable for developers to spend all the money required to fully exploit the quad's capabilities, I will be a grandfather. And I don't have kids right now.

I don't think so. I think it'll only be a few years, but I'm no expert on these things.

Also, depending on how old you are, we'll be wiping our asses with toilet paper made from computers 3 times more powerful than the one's we're using now by the time you're a grandfather.

Someone for Supreme Commander came up with the "CoreMaximizer" that allowed the game to actually run on several cores, rather than do so as needed. But SupCom was designed to run on 2+ cores, if Sins isn't i don't think a tool like this is possible

If you look it up on the GPG forums, maybe someone thats more awesome than me could make one for Sins. I've yet to meet a SupCom player who stops using it because of how good it is

It's a darn shame Sins doesn't use all teh cores of a multi core processor

I notice when Sins is running it's using 25% cpu usage all the time (all of one core I Assume)

But even with a quad core system, I can't play against 9 AI computers, because as soon as the battles start, the game slows right down

I like to play big maps, 100+, game file modded to double fleet sizes, etc. It used to bring my 4400+ to its knees. My new i7 920 @ 3.6Ghz runs as smooth as anything.