It's sorta makes me smile, in like 99-00, about when I joined this forum I guess, I was switching to SMP, dual slot1 back then with supermicro and tyan mostly, and a few dual pentium pro boxes. I remember hearing a variation of the same arguments against two slower processors(cores) vs a single faster cpu. I guess it was an overclocked 600eb or something bang for buck wise then, or a celly of some sort. But despite what any benchmarks said, the dual system ran better, felt better, and was better, for longer. And nothing supported multithreading that wasn't high end software back then. I remember the first time I could play Quake 2 or 3 with winamp running in the background and no performance penalty and it was a revelation. Few years later we were told HyperThreading was coming, and we all laughed since we'd known two was better than one for a long time and Intel was going to try and help get everyone else, and software developers, onboard now and that was cool. As it happens HT kinda sucked and was a sorry imitation of proper SMP, but it was a start in the right direction. I had and still have a 3.2ghz HT chip, just to remind me what a slow high mhz CPU is mostly(it still plays netflix as my shop computer, and UT and some legacy games). I kinda got out of computers when the first real dual cores on single chip were happening and the rest is history I guess.
The moral of the fifteen year long tale is that I've learned if I have a choice between a cpu that can process four or six threads at once at say 100% of some arbitrary scale, and an eight+ thread chip that will do it at 80% of that arbitrary scale, I will pick the eight+ every time. And not unlike my first P6DBS with a surprisingly expensive pair of p2/300's in there stoic little black coffins, they just run better, longer. Two is almost always better than one.
That eight core vs six core will be more pleasant to use, longer, and handle concurrent daily workloads, longer, than the six or a four, even a faster one. You can believe it or not but personal decade+ experience has shown me nothing but.
This isn't to say it will game any faster now or later, but it's certainly not going to be worse, and there is a chance it'll be better. As it is now, half the cpu is laying around bored playing games, and the games are still very pleasant and playable. People speak ill of not utilizing all the cores but what more do you want from these games? The very lowest bottom of those four benchmark charts posted above are all perfectly playable. Whats more is, it isn't that the cores don't work, it's that software does not utilize them well. Go bitch at the developers if a game isn't using eightyseven cores effectively.
Most of the time the answer is the overhead is too high, the game doesn't really need them all, or it's just too difficult to make it work vs the payoff and it does not effect our bottom$ line much. I personally reward developers that make games that run well on my hardware with my money. If a game runs crappy on my hardware or is some buggy shit console port with annoying controls, I don't play it.
It's not a huge upgrade six to eight in this case, but it is an upgrade. I would and did make it. It might be different if it was a $300-$400 investment, it's at absolute worst $250 and likely quite a lot less though. Small price for little grief and some breathing room imo. Nothing wrong with going Intel either if you game a bunch or like the color of the box or just have the money, it's all fast these days. That's why these threads go on for so long, it's hard to pick winners when they are all excellent.
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