I've researched Intel's current offerings til I'm blue in the face over the past month, but still have yet to make up my mind because of all the attractive options at various price points. The vast majority of my computing time is spent on general use - browsing, e-mailing, playing music, IM, MS Office, Photoshop CS3, etc. The catch is that, like many, I'm often doing all of those at the same time. I plan on gaming lightly, but not enough that it's my main consideration for this build.
Combing through this and other forums lately, I've seen various claims made that quad-core is significantly better for heavy multitasking than dual. I've also seen plenty of claims that this is not true at all; that there's virtually no discrepancy now, and probably won't be for at least a year or two to come.
Perhaps those with experience running both duals and quads at similar clock speeds - i.e., a E6600 vs. Q6600, or E8400 vs. Q6600 @ 3GHz, could help me out here. Is there a noticeable difference in heavy multitasking? Specifically, for example, let's say I want to have Firefox open with 20 tabs, Thunderbird, AIM, Winamp, Avast, Photoshop, Google Earth, encoding audio, and MS Word... and a movie or game playing on a second monitor, just for the sake of argument. Is this a scenario where a current-generation C2D would potentially start sputtering, but an equivalent C2Q would chug right along?
Just a humble suggestion from a n00b, but a sticky or something addressing this topic might prove useful. Surely there are others who want to factor this into their buying decision, but the answer is inexplicably evasive (at least as far as I can tell) in light of the fact that most reviews and forum chatter focus solely on whether a given upgrade will add a few FPS in Crysis, or similar single-app benchmarks. It's abundantly clear from all I've read that 95% of current applications, on their own, favor clock speed over extra cores... but is multitasking and overall OS performance a different beast?
(BTW, I realize that having sufficient RAM and a fast HD are also critical in building a snappy/responsive system, so I'm planning to pick up 4GB DDR2 and a WD640 with whatever CPU I settle on... if I can ever make up my mind!)
Combing through this and other forums lately, I've seen various claims made that quad-core is significantly better for heavy multitasking than dual. I've also seen plenty of claims that this is not true at all; that there's virtually no discrepancy now, and probably won't be for at least a year or two to come.
Perhaps those with experience running both duals and quads at similar clock speeds - i.e., a E6600 vs. Q6600, or E8400 vs. Q6600 @ 3GHz, could help me out here. Is there a noticeable difference in heavy multitasking? Specifically, for example, let's say I want to have Firefox open with 20 tabs, Thunderbird, AIM, Winamp, Avast, Photoshop, Google Earth, encoding audio, and MS Word... and a movie or game playing on a second monitor, just for the sake of argument. Is this a scenario where a current-generation C2D would potentially start sputtering, but an equivalent C2Q would chug right along?
Just a humble suggestion from a n00b, but a sticky or something addressing this topic might prove useful. Surely there are others who want to factor this into their buying decision, but the answer is inexplicably evasive (at least as far as I can tell) in light of the fact that most reviews and forum chatter focus solely on whether a given upgrade will add a few FPS in Crysis, or similar single-app benchmarks. It's abundantly clear from all I've read that 95% of current applications, on their own, favor clock speed over extra cores... but is multitasking and overall OS performance a different beast?
(BTW, I realize that having sufficient RAM and a fast HD are also critical in building a snappy/responsive system, so I'm planning to pick up 4GB DDR2 and a WD640 with whatever CPU I settle on... if I can ever make up my mind!)