whats faster a 3g dual or a 2.4 quad?
For gaming
Video editing
A 3.0Ghz quad…
Most games won’t take advantage of more than one processor, will they? Unless the OS you’re running handles this stuff for you, then for gaming I’d go with the 3g dual.
Otherwise you’ll have 1 out of 4 processors busy with the game on the quad, while the other 3 will just be sitting there doing mostly nothing?
I dunno, unless the game and OS you’re running are specifically written for multiple processors, that is.
The Prices are the same.
So my P4 3g will run a game better then a 2.4 quad?
Sure you can, in windows anyways. You start the game or app and then open the task manager, go to the process tab, select the process,right click on it, choose affinity, in there you can choose what particular cpu is used, you would of course check them all.
[original attachment deleted after 2 years]
Processor Affinity is different than load-balancing. You’re basically saying “you can run on any of these processors” but that’s not always a good thing.
Take this scenario: a complex instruction is run on CPU1, takes a long time (by processor standards) and is cached. Then the same instruction is immediately requested again, but this time it’s sent to CPU2. CPU2 doesn’t have it cached, so it takes another long time. It would have been faster to just send it to CPU1 again.
Multi-threading is pretty complex to build into a program and OS. The application needs to be able to say “if you have 2 processors, do this kind of task on #1, and this different kind of task on #2”.
Processor Affinity is like saying “you can use either processor” and that’s not always a good thing.
The question is, of course, are you better off with one fast processor or multiple slower processors. Especially for games, which is what he was asking about.
Also, don’t confuse multi-CPUs with multiple core CPUs.
I have no idea about specific games though.
Some light reading 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_affinity
I should have read my own links:
And that’s a dual-core, not dual-processor. Dual-core and quad-core usually share their caches.
But it’s changing, there are games that are multi-core and multi-processor aware.
uh your p4 is like a paper weight compared to a quad core, go with AMD, they are much faster then p4’s and AMD just launched their quad cores too, personally i’d go with a amd 6000+ i have a few friends that have that cpu and love it, with 4gb ram, and two video cards, speaking of video cards, you’ll want a 8800’s newest cards out great for gaming, some other cards that’ll get the job done are:7900’s, and ati’s x1900 series
dual-core, not dual processor? the fx 72’s are dual processors each dual cores aren’t they? socket F or something
i’m aware that this thread is old-ish,
but.
I would go for the Quad core over the Dual core if you want to Encode/Transcode (whatever the correct term is) Videos, and play games at the same time.
because I regularly Encode movies to DVD Format for personal use and have noticed that a Quad core would be nice, to encode up to 4 movies at the same time, instead of just encoding 2 at the same time.
encoding 4 movies at the same time is nice if your harddrive can handle it, or if you have 2x hard drives then that’d better
I’m loving the Intel stuff 