Originally posted by: JPB
Do you all believe that in over a year...that the Quad 9450 will be faster than the E8600 and even the E8700 in most apps and games ?
		
		
	 
nope.
Maybe 3-5 years with the help of SMT & newer arch & better programmers...
dual cores @ higher ghz win this generation.  (of course a quad with equal ghz wins most of the time - like 4ghz dual vs. 4ghz quad).  An E0 stepping 45nm quad with a 10,11, or 12x multi for ~ $250 would be a nice buy.  LOL.  E0 duals are my pick for the remainder of the year.
edit: 
The cons of the quad are:  price, multiplier, heat, FSB limits, lack of multithreaded support in games & mainstream apps.
The cons of the dual are: 2 missing cores, poor performance in folding & video editing programs (90% of which are multithreaded apps)
The duals are cheaper, cooler, and overclock higher, they give you better mutipliers & higher FSB limitations.  They perform equally or faster than a quad 
because you can generally overclock them higher.  If you fire up a game of crysis pitting a 4ghz dual with a 4ghz quad you'll get near identical FPS - like 39 vs. 40.   If you ran this comparison and, for example, the quad gave 78, while the dual had 39 - then then paying the 100 dollar premium for the quad would be a no-brainer.  Until # of cores makes a greater difference than mhz does in my favorite benchmarks, my vote will remain with the duals (especially the 10x multi E0 stepping cpus).